TJ Boulting, 59 Riding House Street
To the untrained eye Colin Glen’s line drawings may not look like much – in fact you’re probably looking at them and thinking ‘I could do that’, but there’s much more to these images than meets the eye. Glen went through quite a process to get to the finished versions and that’s what makes his work in his new exhibition at TJ Boulting gallery so interesting – after all it’s conceptual art and what is conceptual art without a bit of an explanation alongside it? Glen’s new work began as two wire objects – a tangled ball and a circle, which he had in his collection of debris. He kept the ball of wire that he found in a building site in the late 1990s and the wire circle comes from a lampshade that he’d recently found on the street during his walk from home to his studio. Inspired by these ‘found’ objects he spent many hours creating line drawings with considered mark-making using pencil on paper. The result may appear simple, but the accumulation of lines that are worked over one another and gently smudged, seem to at second glance evoke shadows, texture and depth.
To Gloucestershire-based Glen, it’s the shadows that he’s most interested in and the reproductions of objects onto canvas, which he has alluded to in his rather neat exhibition title ‘From Confusion to Clarity’. In another piece of work, he’s zoomed in on the ball of wire (the canvas measures 10 x 8 feet), but what we see is actually a shadow of its original – which (as we’ve been told) is a direct reference to Marcel Duchamp’s last painting ‘Tu m’ (1918), which reveals shadows of his ‘readymades’, bicycle wheel, coat rack and corkscrew transferred onto a canvas.
From Confusion to Clarity is on until 24 March, for more information about the exhibition [click here]
A print edition by Colin Glen is also available to buy from Other Criteria [click here] for more information
