John Hurrell – 15 February, 2011

In this first show where Melanie Roger has taken over the Anna Bibby space with her own brand as dealer, we see works by the two painters Graham Fletcher and Tim Thatcher. Both use the traditional means of oil on canvas, but whereas Fletcher is tidy and pristine stylistically, Thatcher is rawer and consciously ‘rough’.

It is an interesting pairing with vivid contrasts. Fletcher’s canvases are a lot bigger than Thatcher’s, with tighter modelling and plasticity, and more elegantly composed, featuring interiors. Thatcher’s on the other hand are set outside with raggedy edges and mottled planes. Both come from their creators’ imaginations and have no ‘factual’ origins.

Thatcher’s images feature boxlike architectural forms rendered with a brusherly greasy daubed paint, often a dominant streaky greeny blue. They seem to be painted quickly and improvised on the spot. The best ones have a lively energy and vibrant organic texture.

Fletcher’s images differ in that there is a political subtext, a post-colonial undercurrent. The rooms depict fictitious collections of tribal (usually Polynesian) art but while the spaces are made up the specific ‘primitive’ items on display with the furnishings aren’t. They are carefully researched and accurately rendered, even though the accompanying wall-labels and titles lack this detailed information. Fletcher’s paintings are an imaginative hybrid of the photographs of Louise Lawler (that examine the domestic settings created for the collections of the wealthy) and the ironic ethnographic installations of Fred Wilson. Even though their political purpose is not stated, these images have a mood, a sense of resentful indignation that the rendered tribal carvings are now homeless, in an alien, inappropriate environment. The ancestral figures being used now as décor are slightly ominous, with a vague menace suggesting living presences.

Many of Thatcher’s paintings, instead of being about the display of art objects, look on the other hand to be preoccupied with their transport and storage - the figurative painting equivalent of a mimimalist like Noel Ivanoff. The depicted sheds or houses seem to be huge plywood crates where paintings are lined up and stored vertically in rows - and so Roger’s coupling of these two artists is a clever, witty pairing: a comment on ownership, private display and storage.

The show examines life for collected art (or functional objects) away from the institutions or locations they were originally made for. It has a sort of poignant melancholy, a wistful sadness, a yearning that interacts with Roger’s comparatively spacious gallery setting. An appealing incongruity that is inescapably political in its contradictions.

John Hurrell

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