John Hurrell – 4 August, 2011

Trenton Garratt presents here a selection of assorted paintings and sculptures he has made over the last four years, collated under the theme of radiating, reflected and refracted light, and mediating on means of transmuting that into images. Initially seeming disparate the ten sets now look surprisingly tight and interconnected.

The images all involve images of facetted angular surfaces or beams of spreading light bursting through trees, camera lenses or suspended crystals. Five Star consists of five small canvases of a landscape taken off the web, with sunlight radiating towards the viewer. The images seem identical but you have to scrutinise them closely to detect that they are not. They are related to early Martin Basher landscapes but less folksy. In their repetition they take on a vaguely mystical significance.

One large painting shows rings of light scattered in a forest clearing being documented by a camera, these hovering coloured circles generated by light ricocheting within its lens. Other diamond-shaped canvases show Stellaesque layers that are like flickering prisms. They elucidate octagonal frames of pale or dark tones, advancing and darkening as they approach the centre. There are also other smaller paintings in coloured triplets, setting out chromatic wavelengths of subtractive and additive hues that can be connected respectively to printed ink surfaces and projected light.

A work which in my view stands out above the rest is All I Want Is You: Radial Drawing, a work with two diamonds serving as vortices for densely spiralling graphite lines - an obsessive Dale Frank drawing identifying with a heartbroken Bryan Ferry (title is from Roxy Music). Theoretically the diamonds serve as sources of compressed dark light winding around two lovers, but they also could be conduits draining energy away.

The sculpture Our House, besides showing light reflected off long skinny slivers and disappearing into intricate dark cavities, also indicates a romantic ambivalence, the house as symbol of domestic bliss turned into an unstable mound of baked ceramic chips waiting to be slowly removed one at a time like Pick Up Sticks. It perhaps refers to the impermanence of all things as expressed (along with other concepts) in the Mahayana Buddhist scripture, The Diamond Sutra, a text possibly alluded to in Suncatcher the suspended crystal hanging by the K’ Rd window.

John Hurrell

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