Artists

Anton Cotteleer

Press release

Anton Cotteleer: 'raw/still/again' In his essay 'The Fall of Art', the American writer William Burroughs celebrates the power of montage, writing: 'montage is actually much closer to the facts of perception, than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put what you have just seen down on canvas. You have seen half a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments. And the same thing happens with words...Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out of the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors.' (The Adding Machine: Collected Essays, London: John Calder, 1985, p. 62) Burroughs' words come to mind when looking at the work of Anton Cotteleer, an artist whose work stands as an exploration of the fragment, the partial object and the encounter, mostly mediated by photography and nearly always delivered as sculpture. His contribution to the field of contemporary sculpture is a subtly sensitive and considered one, as this new exhibition 'raw/still/again' – evocative of openness, fragmentation and non-narrative structure simultaneously - demonstrates. His primary domain is the home, rather than the street, focussing on the found photograph – as an image and material object with personal, autobiographical meaning. We see an inquisitive sculptural imagination at work, exploring the material, textural, spatial and emotional lives of photographs and using them as source material for the creation of new sculptures. Often these images are memorised, joining a databank of images in the artist's head that are then ruminated upon. The resulting sculptures are always surprising, anxious objects. References to artistic convention are mixed together with more private associations. Familiar, yet unfamiliar objects are created. Complete, yet incomplete; rough, but smooth; hand-made, but immaculate; passive, but also jarring...always disrupting our sense of normality and defamiliarizing our expectations. This new exhibition, comprising 15 new works, is full of such unsettling sculptural conundrums. Ceramic, epoxy resin and fabric are the main materials here, often used together within the same work. They enable combinations of hand-modelled and cast surfaces, and different levels of artistic touch and manipulation. Cotteleer has a fascination with old-fashioned handkerchiefs, using their gridded patterns and translucency, and encasing them within resin surfaces. Tears of sadness and of joy are suggested, and many of his works are haunted by a mood of erotic melancholia. The palette is a garish, troubled blend of skin tones, pastels and earthy colours. Heads are balanced on the plinth-knees of a headless caryatid. (Cotteleer sometimes deploys his sculptures as supports for other smaller sculptures). Inversions are everywhere, as heads are suspended upside down mid-sleep and buttocks point to the heavens. Long-known and memorised forms are combined in ceramic to create double images in which bodies and body parts meld, sleep walking into one another. Their symmetries and asymmetries, their hollowness and solidity, their impossibility and plausibility all unsettle in equal measure. Everything (and nothing) is what it seems. Cotteleer's world is one of well-worn, well-ruminated image-objects, amalgamations that have been eroded by memory and smoothed by desire. Partial glimpses into something bigger, recalled but unseen, and only briefly felt. Raw…still…again. Jon Wood