Geoff Newton: shit
At first this show might appear confusing. There is a substantial group of works (paintings, drawings, a ‘sculpture’) by the maverick artist Vivienne Binns; then a number of paintings created collaboratively by Binns with Derek O’Connor and Geoff Newton. What’s going on? Binns explains things in a statement in the catalogue. Working backwards: the collaborations were made by one artist making ‘half’ a painting, and another responding. Binns had been impressed by the free styles of O’Connor and Newton and asked them to be involved in the project. But the pivotal moment, as it were, lay with the creation of Binns’ painting Maelstrom (2002), where she divided the surface roughly in half, with, as she states ‘one side the more pre-conceived, patterned surface and the other a freer, organic passage, which would also be the result of the swing of the arm, an immediate interaction between myself and the canvas’.
As Binns continues in her statement (and made clear at the exhibition floortalk), this painting became a ‘battle royal’, where ‘much of the conflict occurred along the division’. It was an attempt to reconcile two distinct formal aspects of her practice: the open process of making drawings versus the controlled geometric patterning of certain of her paintings.
The tension at the faultline, then, is in a way outsourced in this project: one of the collaborators begins, the other responds, in different combinations. Not as easy as it sounds, nor an exercise in style mashing as such. Rather the response becomes a considered reciprocal gesture, with a fair amount of room for intuition. How are we to make out a connection between the two halves of Binns / O’Connor’s Barbarella