Jihad Muhammad John Armstrong
In a catalogue essay accompanying his recent exhibition, John Armstrong used the image of an elephant in a dark room as a metaphor for art practice. As one approaches "in the dark" the elephant presents itself to the touch, testing the validity of the interlocutor's hypothesis (self hypothesized reality). Are we to understand from this parable that art is a white elephant, pinkened by the blind-folded encounter? An hallucination in which art becomes anything one wants it to be? Perhaps a mammoth equivocation. Fortunately the work in this exhibition provides for more challenging observations and offers less temptation for such recipient platitudes.
For some time now this artist's work has presented itself with a kind of emblazoned armour of very active surfaces collaged or painted with repetitive motifs. The hung and free standing works assembled for this exhibition date, for the most part, from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and are typified by a concentrated working of red and black over entire surfaces.
The largest wall piece presents this standard style as a red tarpaulin sprayed with short black digits, their formation 'blown' over the surface. There is a 'tribal' quality to this, and an homogeneity in the insistent, seemingly self-automated rhythms. Upon this matrix two rows of five drawings are appended with book clips. In each of the upper drawings a figure coalesces from a central gathering of digits. In the lower, the densely scumbled graphite grounds each set out a red figure in sharp relief. There is a vertiginous quality to the whole, between the crazed totalising system of the drop and the figures marshalled in front of this system. A beckoning answerability seems to emerge between