Four Fatrasies at the Pump House Gallery is not meant to stir the art world. Grotesque but not enough to shock, technically accomplished yet not enough to impress, the works on display do not speak directly to the viewer. Rather, they speak about the viewer: the twenty-first century subject trying to decode the art before them, and the anxiety they experience when works that defy their mode of viewing are encountered.

As the title suggests, the overarching concept of the exhibition is that of a fatrasy, a medieval nonsense poem which refuses to produce a comprehensive meaning, and often attempts to obscure it under a system of repeating syllables. Pollard’s canvasses successfully visualise this literary strategy through the reiteration of single motifs and the introduction of distorted multiple perspectives. While the viewer struggles to connect the inscriptions in his paintings with their iconographic schemes, a crucial difficulty associated with contemporary spectatorship is exposed: the way in which art encourages the creation of such relationships despite their apparent absence.

Stephenson’s collaged figures facilitate a very different mode of viewing. Medieval and Victorian imagery is enlarged and transformed into two-dimensional cut-outs that masquerade as sculptures or pieces of everyday furniture. Placed on a plush black carpet and facing the entrance into the exhibition, they do not invite one to enter, but rather to survey from a distance; as such, the figures are defined as fetish objects, but the viewer does not quite know what it is he is fetishizing.

The curatorial program, however, is at its weakest when the works by the two artists are placed in close juxtaposition, as is done in the second floor of the exhibition. Stephenson‘s miniature sculptures of Venetian blinds syncopate the space in front of Pollard‘s canvasses, controlling not only the spectator‘s movement, but also his gaze. This mechanism of control seems to create unnecessary obstructions rather than assist the development of relationships, and the forced dialogue is rendered silent.

Until Mar 14

AUSTEJA MACKELAITE