exhibition proved joyously playful and moreish, juxtaposing self- conscious simulacra and provocative originality; romantic abstractions and hyperrealist microspecifics; negative space and the überphysical – this latter perhaps best represented in the towering, minimalist angularity of Leo Bradley’s arch sculpture. Bradley, fascinated by architecture as an experiential forum, had devised an organic structure simultaneously imposing and precarious using repeated fruit boxes, referencing Sir Antony Gormley’s ideology of organised chaos.
A number of pupils had drawn inspiration from other A-level subjects generating interdisciplinarity: there was certainly a metaphysical sense of Mathematics in the unheated air given the number of images and installations which toyed with symmetry. Will Reid and Dominic Povall, both studying English Literature, had used the ghostly anterior narratives of Raymond Carver and the gaudy efflorescences of The Great Gatsby (respectively) as acknowledged stimuli. Povall’s delightfully intimate,
Philip Guston, a Neo-expressionist of the 1960s New York School, argued that “[...] painting and sculpture are very archaic forms… the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.” Guston’s sculpture of the imagination was well represented through the exhibition, from Kai Chelliah’s sensuous string and flexi-ply sphere delightful in its interplay of taut rigidity and dancing curves, to David Shin’s intricate, rectilinear papier-mâché house and Jack Evans’s stained wood miniatures inspired by the planes of light in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Danish interior scenes. Even more grandly memorable was Oscar Maguire’s traditional plaster tribute to the Renaissance, yet his hollow cast of fabric decontextualised from the supporting body introduced a Surrealist dimension. Kevin Kim’s glorious lines-in-space installation, composed of interwoven coloured cords under tension, was an exercise in whimsical mischief belying the excruciating labour of its creation. Impressively, there was an abundance of versatility jostling for attention between the South and Centre Blocks: no mean-spirited, 2D penchant solely for drawing here, but vigour and exuberance in embracing the widest possible range of media. In other words: no “house style”. Naturally, the (sub)urban twentieth century and its potent iconoclasts – one thinks Barbara Hepworth, René Magritte, Rachel Whiteread, Man Ray – constituted the point of departure for many of the boys’ creative journeys, but some of the exhibits also paid homage to earlier figures. Ben Redfern’s luminous dry-point etchings, for instance, with their closely organised lines and desire to defamiliarise paid dues to the “carceri d’invenzione” of Giovanni Piranesi; these meticulous, resourceful studies of isolated staircases were some of the very best pieces on display.
impressionistic collage-sequence of water-colour illustrations was highly commercial, like waxwork stills from Alice in Wonderland harmonised through pigmentation. Reid’s Kafkaesque photographic series shot in Hackney Wick, in contrast, was charged with a contemporary austerity, at times reflected by the human form, at others by formal absence. Reid’s sketchbook identifies photography as a kind of poetry whereby the microcosmic exists in parallel with the panoramic. An astonishing sequence of three prints depicting rotting pizzas, cigarette butts and wilted flowers (each resembling a lost detail from Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’, or reminiscent of Conrad Hall’s cinematography of alienation) was effectively an objective correlative for the menace of quotidian existence, a concept Reid developed in Fugitives (2013), an original film. An attractive counterpart to Reid’s representational nihilism came in the form of Matt Clark’s optical trickery: two stills from a digital animation presenting spiral forms in harmonic relationships.
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