Areal – portmanteau word [A + real – an (other) real]
Areal – Portuguese for sandy beach
Areal – relating to the area of something (Cambridge Dictionary)

I am a light green side/I am a dark green side
I am the structure/I am not the structure
The colour vibrates out of it’s object
And now we are back behind this moment observing the reverse.
We reach an orbit.

Areal aims for a state of being in our contemporary digital, politically uncertain, often grotesque, and fast-paced world. This exhibition proposes the notion of Areal as an exploration of the broad notion of landscape.  

Inês: Can you hear the sun? Are we really listening? Sounds of the Sun is an incursion through our closest star, capturing its unheard voice through NASA’s recordings in circular vinyl to stage the full effect of its audio signal.

Then, Sun (mandarins) deceptively playfully take on a familiar citrus fruit: a mandarin. Here, that ubiquitous healthy snack formally captures the luminous star in our palm’s hand – the mirage of anthropocentric control. Suddenly, mirage morphs into delusion, hallucination, illusion and burning truth at once as aluminium-made mandarins spread around the space in dialogue.

These playful mandarins literally cast a dark reminder of the catastrophic effect of heat: burned and destroyed agricultural crops in ash-like aluminium the most abundant metal on Earth’s crust.

Andy: I say 3 were informed by a street environment but I probably mean 2: a bus shelter structural facade and a telephone box Nurofen advert.

A floor to ceiling pole or channel of aluminium I took from somewhere else - an imagined environment, possibly virtual but always in the here and now in it’s polished side mirroring.

I think of it as a painting: 3 sides worked on/3 reverse sides not. 2 sides can only be viewed at once: [2 contrasting coloured sides] or [a coloured side and the mirrored side] or [a mirrored side and the back] or [a coloured side and the back[. (Actually when you see the back it is 2 sides as well - due to the nature of a channel).  

Consider Areal an (other) real: a place to mirror our environment (mandarins on the floor, a turntable, paintings and yourself - your face, your body as it moves around our exhibition. And then you disappear and are looking at the 2 sides of green doing something slightly ungraspable:

This is Areal Landscape.

Areal Landscape conversation - Andy Jackson & Inês Rebelo

Andy: So for Areal Landscape you have chosen to exhibit 3 aluminium cast mandarins on the gallery floor and a series of drawings on the wall that show the sun with blue pen markings on top. Accompanying this is a sound piece entitled Sounds of the Sun which (correct me if I’m wrong) is a recording of the pulses of electromagnetic radiation emitted by Sun onto the Earth? Could you talk a little about Sounds of the Sun and the drawings?

Inês: Interesting to start with Sounds of the Sun, as it came to my mind to make a sound piece during my first visit to Adam’s Atlas House. The artist-run independent project space I was expecting to find has such intimate, warm, cosy feel to it that it stayed with me as the element to highlight in my proposals, more than its previous historical usage as shoe factory. I was taken by the homely feel, and considered the existing turntable as the vehicle to amplify the ‘presence of art’ into the ‘fabric of everyday life’. Or the other way around, depending on your point of view.

Yes, that’s right, Sounds of the Sun is a vinyl recording made from the vibration of our closest star on LP vinyl. It uses a found soundtrack of these vibrations repeated for 20min. It is a low frequency part of the electromagnetic spectrum and there is a more precise explanation of how the vibrations of the Sun are effectively recorded and translated by NASA and ESA to suit human perception (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/sounds-of-the-sun/). This sound piece is accompanied by a group of drawings titled Radioastronomy (here comes the sun) made whilst listening to this very soundtrack for a long time. It is in a way, my internal weather, if you like, as it is affected by the voice of the Sun. The green and blue lines layered on an image of the Sun, rhythmically, are then dispersed onto the Atlas House’s intimate space.

Together, these works and the 3 aluminium cast mandarins you mentioned, titled Sun (mandarins), attempt to alert for climate emergency in different ways.

I noticed how in your piece The colour vibrates out of its object the green colour sort of magically reverberates and plays with our perception, as if we can’t focus the limits of the surface. At first I thought the rhythm of the green line on my drawings was continuing your work or vice-versa, but the same happens in Shelter. This time it’s with a particular lilac colour. In a concentrated line you’re expanding space as in ‘Instant Loveland’ by Jules Olitski (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/olitski-instant-loveland-t07244), but without the physical apparatus, if that makes sense? It’s almost magical, for lack of a better word. We are left with what could be a mirage on a very very hot day. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about your work at Atlas House, especially around colour and space(s). Did you think of the reference of bus shelter also as shelter from heat? And what about the two pieces From Sunrise to Sunset, what can you reveal about them?

Andy: The three works in the exhibition all have their origins in images, structures and forms I experience in London whilst walking or commuting. Shelter takes two elements from the side of a bus shelter - the horizontal curved roof and the supporting vertical pole. I tend to see things in the street, I then start tuning into them day after day and edit them down into a point of departure for a painting in the studio. Then comes the stage of choosing supports and structures to use and finally colour. The lilac in Shelter was the final studio process and was decided upon as the curved shape wasn’t amplified enough. The lilac outlines the 2D pictorial shape so you have to deal with this plus the 3D reality of the painting. I don’t claim this to be original to me rather as you said it uses techniques lifted from formalism, colour field (Olitski) and other paintings. However rather than simply being another exercise in formalism I’d say these works are trying to push for aesthetic possibilities in the chosen sources, they are departure areas.

In terms of colour the title The colour vibrates out of its object is what I think happens when looking at this work and Shelter. The column in The colour vibrates out of its object is light green on one side, a very dark green (almost black) on another then polished aluminium the other. When you look at the 2 sides of green you can look/experience this until the colours seem to depart from their physical support and become illusionistic or pictorial beyond what they are, I think it is getting lost in colour so that another reality is formed. You start to move around it and become disoriented until the light green disappears and you start to deal with the dark green and aluminium combination. This combination is different so that you have the dark green and its illusionistic association and then the aluminium which reflects us back to the space we are in. The three sides and the movement around give you a compact experience of encountering a painting. A painting that is floor to ceiling.

Combined with these ‘colour trips’ is Inês’s Sounds of the Sun which is an ambient representation of the Sun’s energy/waves that is reminiscent (for me) of listening to a heartbeat through the medium of vinyl with its scratches and analogue fuzz. With the knowledge that is the Sun we’re listening to it becomes a great tool for meditation! I mean this is in a positive manner in that we tune in to the Sun sound as a message from our life giver. We connect our heartbeat and pulse with that of the Sun. It’s like taking notice of a/our God without the religious literature.

Inês: They feel definitively a departure area, and uplifting to experience, both Shelter and The colour vibrates out of its object. In the case of the lilac in Shelter, we are aware of art history references and relate to seeing works in magazines, books or exhibitions. It is a sort of dialogue too, with other artists with whom we share affinity, sensibility or ideas. 

The same departure movement can be said from the column in The colour vibrates out of its object it is almost a case of what you see is not just what you see (1) as we are required to actively move to refocus and are as you said somehow lost in colour.  

The heartbeat sound that you felt from Sounds of the Sun does have a meditation feel to it. When I initially heard the track, made available on YouTube (2), I thought of heart beat and light sabres (Star Wars) with a quite otherworldly feel. But it was different listening to it initially only through computer speakers. There is something quite visceral about the sound from a record LP, and maybe the scratches and the dust from analogue vinyl add to that ‘bodily’ feel. I wonder if that’s where the meditation aspect comes to play, paradoxically? If we didn’t know where the sound came from, we’d open up to other references and interpretations… I suppose this relates with deciding how to title a work, at least for me. The text in the title can anchor and point particular ideas, but on the other hand it gives much information to the spectator and can reduce the free flow of imagination. Nonetheless, I opted for more direct communication in Sounds of the Sun.

I didn’t consider religious connotations, but it’s true that in many ancient cultures the Sun was admired as God and rituals were performed by people worshiping our closest star. When researching radioastronomy Jupiter came up as a very rich radio emitting body, but it didn't capture my attention. There were other references in the Sun that seemed more pertinent to comment on, or bring up. In the three pieces I’m showing at Atlas House ‘Sun’ is part of the all titles. It was important for me to connect the three works especially because they are very different mediums: 2D, 3D and sound (4D?). In this way because the Sun is so present, we can see the works as tributes to our closest star as well. Or as a wake up call, really.

(1) Departure from Frank Stella’s assertion: “All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion… What you see is what you see” in Battcock, G. (ed.) (1995) Minimal art: a critical anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press (available online: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/stellaandjudd.pdf)

(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvMbUxqGuOc

How did text and/or title come up in your works?

Andy: The title

From Sunrise to Sunset 
A door to
Opportunity 

fits into a format I use for a series of paintings on aluminium which take as their point of departure 1980s BT telephone boxes. They are paintings in 3 parts stacked vertically which are the advertising visual area on these telephone boxes. So From Sunrise to Sunset is the name for the upper panel which is edited or abstracted from a 2017 winter Nurofen advert. In the advert it referred to daylight hours around the winter solstice being the time the drug’s effect is supposed to last! In the painting the text is abstracted and open to interpretation. The text here takes on more physical subtraction of the surface of paint. It is not a seamless surface as in its advertising source.

The middle section in this series is always A door to as I want this idea of a threshold between 2 places. And then Opportunity I came to through making the bottom section blank - a monochrome in the art world, an opportunity for an image/product in the advertising/capital world. As I mentioned before the 3 in 1 titles become open to interpretation. But it fits with this spectacle experience of always being transported somewhere else whilst experiencing images, visual phenomena in a city. A door to somewhere else.

Coming back to surface this painting lays bare areas of aluminium - so the viewer becomes a blurred presence within it. The paint surface edge to aluminium is graphic/hard edged and this sets a contrast to the blurred reflections in the metal.

In Shelter the title was decided upon obviously from its sources use - a shelter from the rain most of the time but also as a shelter from the Sun. A place of refuge from sunburn and skin damage. In the art object it is a picture of a shelter and is pretty useless as its title. It becomes rather an aesthetic or an aestheticised object.

With your Mandarins Inês they are cast in aluminium. I don’t often see aluminium cast that much with bronze seeming to be a preferred choice. Can you talk a bit about the Mandarin as an aluminium object? Weirdly I see them going back to the Earth as solid aluminium posing as a natural Mandarin.

Inês: Aluminium is a material I’ve worked with for many years now, through painting. Sun (mandarins) are my first tridimensional piece using aluminium that is melted for casting. Bronze is traditionally a noble sculpture material and in that sense would have been a more usual choice perhaps, but I was more interested in exploring the properties of the material I’ve been working with in painting, and extending it further. And so aluminium became a natural choice, a consequence of studio process.

Although not usually found pure in nature, I like the fact that aluminium is the most abundant metal on the Earth’s crust as we can get, ubiquitous if you like, as opposed to precious, scarce or rare (often more appealing as commodity). Using recycled aluminium also means the final cast mandarins are part of a cycle. 

However, its material presence as cast was a surprise to me, I have to admit. The cast is from everyday mandarin fruits but its outcome is rather otherworldly, once more. The reference to the index, to the bright orange mandarin is visually muted here. Somber ash from burned wood take place and its texture is instead what we are presented with. The colour is in our memory and each one of us will bring their subjective ‘bright orange’ or ‘greenish speckled orange’ to the Sun (mandarins).

I sort of had Vija Celmins piece in my mind (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/100210), a beautiful work of her that I’ve thought about, which is for me a comment on representation. It’s a piece where painted bronze casts and existing rocks are displayed next to each other. Original and clone, verisimilar rendered, are presented to us as conundrum.

In Sun (mandarins) there is no riddle and no physical original, but the prime reference is in our experience of eating healthy snacks, of holding mandarins, peeling nectarines, seeing clementine fruits in our hands,... Those little sun ripe citrus of our memory, whose appearance resembles images of the sun itself taken by spacecrafts (we never see the Sun like this in the sky - https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap960520.html - but can recognise it in images like that captured by technological apparatus). Here, in the aluminium objects on the floor of Atlas House the vitality is tragically gone, muted, ‘ashed’, greyed out, burned out literally. This is intentional as an alert for burned crops and drought in global heating. And, maybe that’s where you’d see the Earth reference of the solid aluminium ‘posing as natural Mandarin’ as you mentioned?

I remember us discussing the idea of adding one or two Sun (mandarins) on top of the edge of one of your pieces, but that didn’t seem to work. The dialogue between our works with for example Shelter and Sun (mandarins) is more subtle in the end. It was a question of viewpoint, of perspective, and how they’d be more identifiable. Seen from below the cast aluminium objects become more generic, whereas on the floor and seen from above (bird’s eye view) the stalk and the texture give out more, as fruits.

Did you think about points of view or perspective distortion in the different panels of From Sunrise to Sunset a door to opportunity, or Shelter maybe? Or even in The colour vibrates out of its object as the painting progresses from floor to ceiling?

Andy: In terms of point of view all my works for this show play with unconventional or multiple heights to view paintings as such. I think with Shelter it would have failed if I added too much content to the horizontal as it is above head height 235cm. It doesn’t need too much inspection. This is quite unusual for me as in previous works I tried to make the surface rich for inspection and detail (as in the upper half of From Sunset to Sunrise). My work process is to add layers of paint (between 9-12) and then sand back so that you have a flattened archeological surface. You can see several layers at once, several time zones if you like, it is a flattening of time and space. This process came from a friend of mine who was trying to achieve a flat finish in his paintings so that when he poured gloss onto it, it would produce a mirror like finish (I think he nicked this from Ian Davenport (https://www.iandavenportstudio.com/artworks/categories/8/ ). Rather than obscure or mask the flat finish I have decided to exploit and investigate this so that you have a history there. 

With The colour vibrates out of its object the distanced view is of monochrome colours but on closer inspection you can see the detail: flattened textures and flecks of paint. Even in the polished aluminium it isn’t quite perfect and I have left buff marks in there as indicator of process or areas of physical work. These works pose as instantaneous moments from a distance but are in fact ridiculously laboured.

We have talked a lot about the works in the exhibition and it would be interesting to relate how they functioned at Atlas with the title and subject for the exhibition Areal Landscape. As I have talked with Adam the exhibition when experienced on our opening over 4 hours had a heightened experience of the sun's position and the weather. At Atlas the space is a top floor flat which is architecturally in the eaves so to speak with rooftop windows facing south, west and north. Inês you originally came up with this idea/word Areal what are your thoughts?

Inês: It will be good to look back and cast a light on that process, no doubt. Areal emerged as a way to articulate our clusters of interests in several variations, until we settled for Areal Landscape, which I’m glad we did.

Areal is sandy beach in Portuguese but I wouldn’t use it as a title for an exhibition in Portugal, strangely. The word Areal allows for additional cultural readings by the proximity with the familiar English word ‘real’ and by translating as ‘relating to the area of something’. It made sense to think of it as a portmanteau word, which is a device used by an author dear of mine, Lewis Carroll. Hence Areal [A + real – an (other) real]. Altogether ‘Areal Landscape’ became a framework for a broad exploration of the notion of landscape.

Although the concept of landscape is traditionally rooted in painting which we both practice, for Areal Landscape the collective of works spans across different media: drawing, sound, installation and painting itself. This is an important aspect of Areal Landscape as we are interested in notions that can be articulated beyond the exclusivity of a particular art historical medium. Areal Landscape is broad, and can be articulated or manifest in any medium, even beyond the ones on display in the show at Atlas House, in extremis. Also, we reference fields outside art language(s) such as everyday urban life and astronomy (with a focus on the sun and global warming) whilst retaining aesthetics from this. Areal Landscape is inherently urban and multidisciplinary.

The sensitive experience of the sun's position and the elements that you and Adam noted during the opening is symptomatic. The sun and the weather permeate Atlas House through the rooftop windows and the existing ladders people climb on to. It’s quite an amazing space architectonically speaking, and homely at the same time. As I see it, Atlas House was Areal Landscape too because Areal Landscape is unframed, but timebound. I wish Areal Landscape would continue and I imagine it will morph into something else… 

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Andy Jackson is an artist based in London and moving to Sheffield. Since 2016 Jackson has been exhibiting paintings and artwork in exterior urban environments. Using his status as an artist outside the gallery system Jackson has undertaken projects that play with this system.

In Datum Exterior the artist hung paintings outside contemporary art galleries in London in an attempt to communicate with each gallery. With each painting Jackson would email the gallery their current press release mirror imaged, as well as a link to an instagram account @datumexterior which displayed photos of the painting outside the specific gallery. In We cannot accommodate you the artist replaced business stickers attached to a project space in Catford with blanked paint elements, made to look like stickers. The project included a proposal to the gallery to replace all stickers with the completion resulting in an exhibition inside the gallery. This was politely rejected by the gallery stating: ‘it’s not something we can accommodate…’ The project was completed outside the gallery without official acknowledgement.

Jackson’s works intended for interior projects use the aesthetics of urban environments experienced in his exterior projects. Telephone kiosk advertising, roller shutters, bus shelter elements and business stickers are all examples which the artist renders into his works through painterly mimicry and specific measurement ratios.

Recent exhibitions include Doublethink at Asylum studios in Bentwaters Park, Suffolk, 2018, The Window at 1909 7th Avenue, Los Angeles 2018. Solo exhibitions include Commercial, Bell Green Retail Park, Sydenham, London, 2017 The Possibilities of Datum, Test Space, Spike Island, Bristol and InsrtSHUTTER, SE9 Container Gallery, both 2016.

www.andy-jackson.org.uk



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Inês Rebelo (b. 1981, Lisbon) lives and works in London. She studied painting, achieving distinction as licentiate from the Faculty of Fine-Art, University of Lisbon, and is Masters of Fine Art by Goldsmiths, University of London. Her researches encompass painting, drawing and installation, sometimes including site-specific projects and extending in collaborations with various cultural agents.

An astronomical expedition lies at the heart of Rebelo’s practice. Much of her work’s experiential status necessitates the relationship between the inside world of earth and outside world of space, between the earthly ‘now’ and the cosmological ‘then’, provoking an intrinsic advancement towards her artistic access to the realm of cosmos. Rebelo’s latest works bring to light the concept of the other. The political dynamics of the encounter between different communities and cultures, as described in postcolonial theory, finds parallel in nuanced modes of exchange between other and self, considered in continental philosophy.

Her work has been exhibited in Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and has been the subject of several publications. Highlights in her practice include solo exhibitions in Curitiba (Ybakatu), London (The Bun House; The Old Police Station) and Lisbon (Galeria Monumental; Paulo Amaro Contemporary Art) as well as group shows at Fundação EDP, Porto; National Glass Centre, Sunderland; Kunstverein Speyer, Speyer; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Union Fenosa, A Coruña; Museu Nacional de Ciência e Técnica, Coimbra; Globe Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; ASC Gallery, London, ENCLAVE, London (Deptford X), Seventeen Gallery, London; Gasworks, London; Chiado8, Lisbon; Estufa Fria, Lisbon (Antecip’Arte) and ZDB, Lisbon, among others. Most recently, Rebelo’s work featured in the dynamic biennale Glasgow International 2018, Glasgow.

Inês Rebelo received a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grant and an honours award at Fidelidade Mundial Prize. Since 2011, she is Associate
Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.

www.inesrebelo.info