John Hurrell – 3 October, 2016

This show of recent painted sculpture by Ian Peter Weston dwells on his own (apparently) lifelong fixation on matters aeronautic, his creative infatuation with military or domestic aircraft and their parts. Weston is blessed with an obsessiveness that sparks off his creative energies as a producer of extraordinarily strange wall objects. His unusually constructed, life-size ‘skins’ project out towards the viewer (in deep space) at never-to-be-anticipated angles.

Unusually creative in their application of engineering principles and the laws of physics, these ersatz parts of cutaway motors, fuselages, tanks or wings are fragile because of their delicate use of thin cardboard, balsa, paper and paint. It is as if Weston is a strange intellectual synthesis of Thomas Demand, Peter Trevelyan and Chris Burdon. A confederacy of things…(a reference to John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces perhaps) has no suspension bridge type wires holding up complex configurations like with earlier works, for the sculptures here are quite different.

Even though a lot of these works focus on the outer shell of large aircraft parts and are positioned peripherally on walls, spatially Weston really activates the Godkin living area with his characteristic outward projecting, vertical fins and hollow balsa horizontal beams. He accentuates an invading linear vector which while parallel to the walls, implies a penetration of the centre of the domestic space, an aggressive intrusion of the volumetric allocated to the gallery visitor.

This show is fascinatingly varied, often emulating riveted panels that go on the outside of fuselages, wing-flap cross-sections, or tail rudders. You move around its unusual forms and can look through underneath, often seeing daubed on pale green paintwork serving as underpaint, literally, and implying a variety of strangely internal, unseen, streaky camouflage. Unusual puns about functionality occur, such as confusing metal plates with shields, scales or tiles. Or rivetted wing fins with inlaid piano lids.

The fact that these are bits of planes suggests the presence of some terrible tragedy where the remnants have finally been located. Weston‘s preoccupation seems to also be a metaphor for the flight of the imagination, the state of reverie artists need to pump up the energy that brings their projects to fruition; the journey in the mind that coaxes along the public profile and if lucky, the art career. With this display of seven wall sculptures, he has given Godkin the best show she’s had so far in her York St gallery/apartment. It is a fantastic presentation deserving of much wider appreciation.

John Hurrell

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