Pierre Imhof & Raul Gabriel

Welcome to His Planet

26 July - 9 September 2006

This is a show by two very different artists, each of whose work, exploring the rhythms and intensities of the city, unexpectedly illuminates the other's. Their dialogue highlights the pictoriality of video and the temporality of painting, aspects often ignored by contemporary practice in the two media.

For the GM Traffic Lights videos, in the downstairs gallery, Raul Gabriel has taken a lengthy shot of lights near his studio to produce a series of abstract works shown on a plasma screen. Digital manipulation of the image brings out aspects of the visual experience that generally pass unperceived as the lights change, flaring and fading in their repetitive patterns. Underscored by the accompanying sound, the pulsing vitality of the image evokes not so much the stop-go of traffic as a world where the mechanism of control takes on the life and agency assumed to be ours. Brooding, lyrical and threatening by turns, the GM Traffic Lights are closer to painting than to most multi-media art. Alongside the videos can be seen the same artist's GM Abstracts, paintings that share in the same sardonic but engaged reflection on the possibility of freedom.

On the ground floor, Pierre Imhof shows two paintings: a triptych, This Will Not Be Televised, Parts I-III and a diptych, This Will Not Be Televised, Parts IV & V. The triptych, 2.55m high and 4.20m wide, fills the back wall of the gallery like a screen. The diptych, even wider at 4.60m and standing 2m high, is panoramic in scale. These paintings present urban space in the time of experience, a time recreated in the time the eye needs to navigate among singular intensities, establishing relations and developing partial perspectives, and then to travel the painting, building the fragments into a whole. Not there to be given, a finding that depends on getting lost, this is an achievement that can only be lived through, not grasped at a glance.

Musicians before they became painters, the two artists share a sense of time and rhythm, of repetition and improvisation, that still structures their work, providing them with the resources to engage in an image-making that escapes from the flatness, the suspension of personal and historical time, that characterises so much contemporary art.

Raul Gabriel was born in Argentina and raised in Italy; he works in London and Milan. Pierre Imhof was born in Switzerland. He trained in London where he lives and works.