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DAVID BATCHELOR |
For much of the last decade, London-based artist and writer David Batchelor has been questioning and examining our use and understanding of color. He has written extensively on the omission of color in academic works on minimalist artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and in his eloquent treatise Chromophobia, 2000, he argues that color is perceived as a second-class citizen – the feminine, the oriental, the vulgar, the inessential, or the cosmetic –by both the art world and popular culture. Batchelor’s conceptually based artistic practice centers on paying attention to this overlooked aspect of modern life. He incorporates raw industrial color from everyday environments into simple, abstract compositions that highlight its found state: “Our cities are saturated with glowing, flashing, colored light, and innumerable brilliant, shiny, or fluorescent surfaces. This for me is where color begins...in the swatch books for commercial paints, lightening gels, neon, and Plexiglas.”
The Spectrum of Hackney Road I, 2003, is emblematic of Batchelor’s desire to find gritty, relaxed surfaces that will contrast with the intense, glowing hues of the city. Here, old warehouse dollies become frames for found light. Batchelor calls these assemblages that pay homage to the recontextualizing nature of conceptual art and to the long tradition of abstract painting “dirty readymades for shiny monochromes”. To create this abstract condensation of the contemporary urban environment, he also uses lightening gels in signless illuminated shop signs on steel shelving and sticks made up of lit shampoo, dishwashing soap, and other consumer product bottles.
Batchelor is part of a collection of contemporary artists who are countering the tradition of formal purity and metaphysics in abstraction, and are instead immersing themselves in the contingent and everyday life. Polly Apfelbaum, John Armleder, Linda Besemer, Olivier Mosset, David Reed, and John McCracken are some of the other artists working in this new tradition.
- Claire Schneider, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art