Slow Learner at Timothy Taylor Gallery

Slow Learner is a group exhibition curated by Andreas Leventis on the art of graphic aesthetic and communication, looking at solutions to relieve a saturated contemporary artistic market. The expansive exhibition visits various themes of youth and bloom, didactic and educational maturity and romantic and emotional existence, but predominantly focuses on the aesthetics of art.

Featured are 12 different artists who explore ideas of aesthetics, symbolism and message. They examine the gap of reading and comprehension and explore the threshold of popular communication or instructions defined by a direct visual language and playfully subvert, withhold or disavow meaning altogether. John Baldessari’s Storyboard (in 4 Parts): Two men speaking on phone at Stock Exchange (2013) engages with juxtapositions of image and writing in a sublime method. Ideas of gestalt philosophy, surface and texture are also present to enrich the means of communication, while the storytelling pokes fun at human pursuits.

Susan Hiller’s So Don’t Let It Frighten (1975/81) explores ideas of communication, investigating form and autonomous writing. The artist reveals part of the process and interpretation in the exhibition, captured through form. The use of hand and type-written text evokes a trustworthy source of information and juxtaposes with a free and analytical random mark-making. Ghada Amer, I Do Not Love You (2005) finds in movement and drama a way of conveying feelings. Text laid over image and thread over paint embroils the canvas in an emotional turmoil of love and unrequited love; the ambiguity is present as dialogue. Furthermore, Lawrence Weiner Untitled (2005) subtly creates the same condition by imposing off-white cut-out paper on off-white paper with symbols and marks to speak to the viewer.

Typewritten text is recurrent in the artist’s work, along with the exploration of calligraphy. Refreshingly, collage and photography are unequal to the extensive painting as process and apotheosis. We come out of the exhibition with the understanding that we have to look back to our formation years to capture memories of communication, as well as exploring the antique and former. Andreas Leventis is praiseworthy in his endeavor to untangle a complex conundrum in the artistic environment.

Rafael Cunha

Slow Learner is on at Timothy Taylor Gallery until 23^rd August 2014, for further information visit here.