Hugh Stoddart

Review for Contemporary Visual Arts no 21 1998
Kettles Yard, Cambridge September 26 - November 1.
http://www.flowerseast.com/FE/Artists_Originals.asp?Artist=CHAMBERS

Chambers’ paintings carry images of (mostly female) figures. These have simplified cut-out shapes and their most striking feature are the eyes which glare or gaze or at any rate fix the viewer’s attention. Stylised and repetitive, it’s as if these eyes must conform to a set of rules: I am reminded of Ethiopian churches, where lines of angels’ faces gaze down from ceiling-paintings. Yet here we are seeing an artist’s clearly specific and personal iconography.

His work evokes the projected image: radiantly coloured and full of light, but as with a cinema screen, the light is thrown from elsewhere. There is a flattening-out here, an ambiguity between foreground and background: sometimes the figure seems to be made by a cutting away of the surrounding surface and sometimes the attacks made upon that surface (Nitromors serving to bleach away paint) put the figure into the foreground. The figure is often seen from a curious angle which one might see as “recumbant” but makes me think of a camera placed on the ground and looking up - a Hitchcockian strategy and which in contemporary cinema has become a cliched intimation of menace.

Chambers uses a number of motifs in his work, one of which is to place a series of “scratch” marks, scars, somewhere in a painting, often over a figure. Again, I’m reminded of celluloid: scratched, a classic procedure in early structuralist film-making. These marks add to the strong sense of drawing in the work, of line. In the very recent “EVEN THE BLIND SEE” the substantial area surrounding the figure and furniture, which form the painting’s focus, has been blocked in afterwards with narrow shapes which read as three-dimensional: human, chair and table are in enforced communion, packed and shut in. They’re all bordered by thin lines emanating at 90 degrees to their edges: a strange ectoplasm, an ominous radiation.

There’s a fondness for patterns - most often simply spots, a freckling which sometimes lies across the figures and sometimes forms the “aura” given off by them. It seems as if the artist is accessing dreams this way, by this playfulness. At times it’s nerve-rackingly cuddly: there are petal patterns, delicate leaves. Countering these, though (another recurring motif) we often find a long diagonal shape, typically black, emerging as if from a head, at eye-level (or perhaps assaulting it?) This shape bleeds to the edge of the canvas, as if the painting’s surface has been collaged on and then ripped away.

The figures invariably stare out at us - perhaps at the artist too, who seems to be looking into these so-filled framings. Mostly, these figures have their arms down, often with hands joined - in a couple of cases entwined in beads: paradoxically, these serve to ease anxiety yet they’re entrapping the hands. For all their seductive colours and domestic components, these are powerful and uncomfortable paintings.