John Hurrell – 15 February, 2025

Martin Creed has shown previously at Lett in 2015, 2012 and other occasions. In fact this is his fourth exhibition here. His new amusing show of ‘stacked’ brushstrokes—a piling format he has presented before (also investigating movement and scale) where textured brushstrokes are stacked like a multilayered wedding cake, using between 3 and 6 ascending horizontal marks that decrease in length and width—is sometimes decoratively patterned (as if bricks) and sometimes left as horizontally clustered, very tidy, striations from paint-applying bristles.

Comical they may be, but these weird but simple displays of linear thin paint are also rich in allusions to very early process art (like that of Piero Manzoni with his large roll of paper), obsessively repetitive action making, the use of marks as spatial (territorial) markers, the fetishisation of manuality (alluding perhaps to guardedly ‘expressive’ artists like David Reed and Judy Millar), and the very simple joy of placing flat horizontal things on top of (as in ‘above’) each other.

Creed’s title also obliquely suggests that the piled-up bars can be dresser drawers seen directly from the front, or rectangular containers of colour and texture, as well as clothing.

The fact that they get smaller and vertically thinner as they go up makes the resulting incongruous image rather perceptually unsettling, because of the differently implied juxtaposed distances and dense tactilities. Their peculiar compression. And the decorative motifs make some of them look like rather odd, bizarrely long Christmas presents.

The fat horizontal lines make you think about house-painting brushes, the movement of the artist’s wrist and forearm, the paint-holding properties of the bristles, and the possible resistance of the dry paper surface as the wet paint peters out.

Of course the stacked, tiered, horizontal format is also symmetrical and stable, exuding confidence and stability. Vaguely like a mountain made of running rivers, except that Creed loves to celebrate sensual qualities of colour, texture, transparency, scale and tone.

They are an optical treat that is also delicate and strangely brittle. Delighting in one body’s making and of course other bodies’ perceiving.

John Hurrell

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