Larsen Warner is very pleased to present Shoulder pipe forgiveness claw, Ross Taylor’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Shown within gallery II, the exhibition presents an installation featuring a series of new paintings completed over the past year shown alongside two in situ wall paintings.
Taylor’s work reveals the artist and his inner world of personal stories and fictional characters developed within the realm of his London studio. The studio itself is a special and extra-ordinary place, a fabulous cave which at the same time both feeds and consumes the artist’s work. Of course there are issues, topics and conversations that follow him in, but most of what he makes happens there and then, in that specific period of time and space within those four walls. The title Shoulder pipe forgiveness claw can be viewed as a lyrical description of the arm of the artist; an apparatus of limited commutative properties, ritualistically tapping and scratching all day. An extension of himself, the arm becomes a tool in the process of excavating the artist’s thoughts and artistic compulsions and acts as a conduit between the artist and the artworks surface.
The exhibition inspects a merging of two very different preoccupations of Taylor’s mind; how the surface of his work is programmed and activated, and exploring the format of the obsessive and compulsive behaviours that invade the artist’s everyday life. Over the past year Taylor has contemplated components of his personality and how (and if) they could be connected to the way he makes things. Recent developments in his practice have driven his thoughts towards how his painting sits alongside other aspects of his nature, specifically the possible connections that his work has to cultural and historical references surrounding obsessiveness. The eight paintings presented in Shoulder pipe forgiveness claw can be viewed as thresholds, with the marks he makes and the blobs he forms forming a collective of apotropaic symbols. Each mark, scratch and gesture provides a direct connection with the places, objects and literature that feature heavily in Taylor’s research; the taper burns and scratched hexafoils found in medieval London churches or the Porta Magica (The Alchemical Door) found in the Villa Palombara in Rome for example. Over time, each work stops being about surface and becomes about touch and the purpose of surface:
“Touch becomes a place itself with which to hanker and attempt to hold onto something rather than grasping at a feeling to relinquish it for relief. Touch preserved in a constant state, the paintings a two-way sucky system, a transfusion of piped forgiveness, acknowledgment, and looping fulfilment. They do not mimic the anxiety that surrounds a compulsion but rather as Goethe puts it they allow us to dwell at a threshold.”
The creation of the artists paintings occupies a huge space in Taylor’s life. He describes the act of painting as “an activity that is walled off like a big lonely Cathedral…everything and anything gets poured into a work but that process only happens on ‘Cathedral’ grounds.” Taylor creates his paintings, cut-outs and installations through a long and rigorous process of scraping, scratching, staining, cutting and collaging, cultivating an almost obsessive layering of trace and mark with each painting proudly displaying the scars of their own making. The paintings often take years to complete, with materials stored away then re-discovered and re worked, until the final surface takes shape from within. The paintings that have emerged through this process and are presented here in the exhibition have, over the time of their making, begun to take the form of rising land; a view onto a head of a hill, an unknown space ahead coming closer. In an inverted way, they more appropriately become archways, or an entry point, a portal into Taylor’s unique world.
Ross Taylor (b. 1982 Harrow, UK) lives and works in London. Taylor completed his MFA Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2008) and was the Abbey Scholar in Painting at the British School at Rome, Italy (2015-16). Selected recent exhibitions include Rattus Rattus, Gaklerie Russi Klenner, Berlin, Germany (2020); The Studio at 4am, Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, UK (2020); The decorator always gets paid least, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, Romania (2020); Independant, New York, USA (2020); A Spicy Migraine Grease, Christian Larsen, Stockholm, Sweden (2018); As I took her arm she stared through my face at the dark branches of trees over my head, Yellow, Varese, Italy (2018); A Motley Crew, Christian Larsen, Stockholm, Sweden (2017); Teeth Where Fingernails Should Be, Ivan gallery, Bucharest, Romania (2017); Outpost, Caves, Melbourne, Australia (2017); Residence in Nature, Konsthall Växjö, Smaland, Sweden (2016); June Mostra, The British School at Rome, Italy (2016); A Bestiary, Turf, London, UK (2016); An evening with Flat i, Flat i Publishing, London (2015); Structural Object, 27, London (2015); Mudlark, FOLD Gallery, London, UK (2013); School Play, Kingsgate Gallery, London, UK (2013); Backwards Man, CGP, London, UK (2012); How Could Everybody be Wrong, ANDOR/David Roberts Foundation, London, UK (2011); Bunker Bar Christening, ANDOR, London (2011); Haze Moods, Supplement, London (2009).
