Nostalgia of Distance
Nordic Art Agency, Malmō
It is an object of commemoration and, for many people, an object of nostalgia, distance, and lost time.
A found school yearbook from the 1980s is the seemingly arbitrary starting point for my work, a quite unpredictable and fortuitous beginning. The yearbook symbolises a rite of passage, a point of departure, it captures a moment of infinite possibility, the imminent journey to an unknown destination. My work is screen printed onto different papers and collaged together but I think of myself as a painter, the piles of paper, my colour palette. These layers of materials and imagery embody a vast hinterland of narratives and creative ideas that echo back to the yearbook. The creative journey and the personal narratives are encoded in the stratification of materials with only the most recent layer fully visible.
Nostalgia Of Distance
John Atherton’s latest exhibition at The Nordic Art Agency, Nostalgia of Distance presents a series of formal abstract works that are unequivocally in the tradition of modern abstract art. At first sight, they are to be appreciated entirely in the realm of pure visual abstraction and the pleasures of viewing carefully composed colour and form.
However, counter-intuitively to this tradition, Atherton’s work emerges not from the lineage of abstract art but from that of portraiture through the commemorative representations found in the yearbook.
Historically a distant landscape depicted in a portrait painting informs the viewer of a sense of nostalgic contemplation in the sitter. It is with this in mind that Atherton suggests a perceptual shift, that his abstract works could be interpreted by the viewer as a scene through a picture frame window. The nostalgic contemplations of the sitter are inventions conceived by the viewer, as they unravel the abstract ambiguity of the work.
The Nordic Art Agency
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Sweden
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