Gareth Sansom: Don’t Look Now…
“In Life Try Everything Once,” the text on Gareth Sansom’s painting, Bohemian philosophy, proclaims.
When it comes to Sansom, this could be taken several ways. Firstly, it could be just a blunt statement; a way Sansom believes life should be led. Alternatively, it could be completely tongue-in-cheek, a wry wink at the would-be artists who tend to flock to his shows.
But when it comes to painting and drawing, there’s no doubt that Sansom is willing to give just about anything – whether it be style or subject – a go at least once.
Sansom’s 2004 offering – ‘Don’t Look Now…’ – was a run-at-the-gate, break-all-rules exhibition. It was a maelstrom of strange colours and even stranger subjects. Time was in total flux here; there are little mis en scenes that may have occurred 20 years or 20 minutes ago. There are nods to Surrealism, to gestural painting and to minimalism, but none presented in a purist way… in fact this group of work was seriously impure, occasionally bordering on the vicious and then swerving wildly back to the poetic.
There just might be a hint of Sidney Nolan here and even a nod to Brett Whiteley in one of the drawings and, after all, Sansom is from Whiteley’s generation. But where Whitetely went charm-school, Sansom has let loose a psychological tsunami,
In what was arguably the most powerful painting in this group, A random sample, a giant, bulbous thought balloon screams that “It’s blood sugar baby!” On the left-hand side a wizened figure in glasses carries a wine glass marked “A.C.” – presumably a serve of chilled anti-coagulant.
Many of these works seemed to be teetering on the edge of a psycho-sexual precipice and there were numerous hints of Sansom’s darker side. But at the same time it was a balancing act between righteous anger and simmering humour, an element of the emotive that could either lash out with awesome physicality or simply become a bark of harsh laughter.
Sansom himself is all too aware of this balance. That does not restrain him in the least, but he allowed it to come out with something hovering between a wry joke and a serious agenda. In the small work on paper, These are the words, he goes so far as to make a list – these are either the things an artist aspires to, or the things that make him or her a total wanker. They are words thrown at Sansom when his back is turned, and he knows it well: “Angry, Crazy, Enraged, Delirious, Insane, Wrathful, Incensed, Provoked,” and the list goes on.
Strange narratives run through the paintings and drawings. The Keep features a gothic tower, think Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast crossed with a Ren & Stimpy cartoon with lashings of Steven King atmospherics. Thick As A Brick screams out the crazed conversation on the brink of violence. “Do you still not understand?” “I do understand – I DO! I f*** do!”
And, like the demands within the paintings, this exhibition, by an artist who could well be a Sado-Masochistic Peter Pan, demanded attention.
