The Materiality of Thinking
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
An exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Michael Canning starts today at Waterhouse & Dodd on Cork Street in London.
“Michael’s work, whether painting, drawing or sculpture, often defies simple classification,” says the gallery. “Neither truly landscape nor still life, they serve as evocations of more philosophical concerns. As Nicholas Usherwood states in his excellent introduction to the first exhibition catalogue we produced, ‘there is a very strong sense of geography and history, memory and belief, poetry and metaphor, with which these paintings are so subtly imbued.’ We feel the precise same sentiments are as applicable now, and equally relevant to his sculpture.”
According to the artist, “The alterations I make in changing a painting or sculpture are incremental. They are based upon reflection. Much time is spent sitting with the work, listening to it, addressing its weaknesses, planning its improvement. Accounting for it. Trying to identify what has just been said non-verbally, or, rather, un-verbally. The art is what results from the application of the material processes and the thinking processes to transform the material through the vehicle of the particular image in order to make something greater than what really ought to be possible.”
“Michael Canning: there are no bells” runs through April 20 at Waterhouse & Dodd, 26 Cork Street, London, +44 20 7734 7800, waterhousedodd.com.
Franklin Einspruch is the art critic for the New York Sun. He blogs at Artblog.net.
