CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is pleased to present Peter Ashton
Jones’ first solo exhibition at the gallery, curated by Jemima Rose.
The exhibition title refers to
the traditional parlour game that has been played throughout generations, and
is associated most notably with the Victorian era. Latterly known as Blind
Man’s Bluff, Ashton Jones introduces ideas around wordplay, linguistic
evolution, and slippages between fact and fiction from the outset. Buff is an
old English word meaning tag or touch, and Ashton Jones uses his interpretation
of the game and its semantic implications to create a framework that informs
his reasoning and decision making when creating this series. He simultaneously
refers to the relationship between artist and audience.
In broad terms, Ashton Jones begins
with the traditional notion of landscape painting being a window on to the
world. His landscapes refer to real places in West Sussex where he grew up, but
are not specifically topographical accounts of that landscape. Rather, they are
places in which painting is explored through light, rendering, layering and dynamics
of line, form and colour; and operate, therefore, in a space between reality
and imagination.
As well as being partially
observational, Ashton Jones’ paintings might also recall his experience when in
or passing through the landscape. The large painting ‘The Roll Up’ began with
witnessing a grave digger from a train window that came to inspire a poem that
he wrote called ‘An Exploration of a Railway Tunnel’, which was published in the poetry magazine ‘Navis’ in 1996 – ‘I saw a
gravedigger, filling in with only the idea of being left with the means of
getting out.’
Another theme relates to the myth of Theseus’ red ball of
twine, which was given to him by Ariadne before entering the labyrinth to slay
the Minotaur, in order to enable him to find his way back out.
Given the plastic artificial nature of painting, what
ultimately binds together the above themes, and the diversity of imagery and
language, is a questioning of what is real and what is fictional in a painting?
What is believable? This question is posed directly in the large painting ‘Blind
Man’s Buff’, which depicts the artist’s left hand with index finger pointing, which
might be judgemental, or directing, or simply pointing towards something. It
also refers to the biblical account of Doubting Thomas, who had to touch Christ
in order to know whether he really had resurrected from death. Ashton Jones
then, embeds narratives deriving from the personal to historical to
mythological, in order to disperse clues that guide towards or away from a
definitive destination.
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