A light weight
Scott McCracken
‘A Light Weight’ is an exhibition of small paintings by Scottish born, London based artist Scott McCracken. All of the works presented in this exhibition, with one exception, have been executed using acrylic on canvas board. While they could be considered as studies, as preparatory workings out in advance of the later paintings, they are themselves are still very much paintings in their own right. Despite their modest scale and means of production, they offer a glimpse into how he pictorially constructs, how elements are assembled into a configuration that points towards a type of imaginary still life. Their handmade geometry exists as a binding, yet elastic force, where elements are held in position, often suspended in a field of shallow depth.
A Light Weight
The title for the exhibition, ‘A Light Weight’ offers up the possibility of a playful contradiction. Lightness and weightiness are often attributed to works of art; these paintings attempt to approach the lightness of a drawing countered by the weightiness of a sculpture. The motifs fluctuate between the diagrammatic and the corporeal, never fully settling as either. His paintings have frequently focused on the picturing of modelled, volumetric forms, such as spheres, cones and cylinders. While many of these recent works continue to contain such motifs, he is (re)introducing a spatial flattening-out here. Areas have been worked and re-worked, where the pictures allow for both an overpainting of and an under-touching on their surface. Another possible title for the exhibition was ‘Guesswork’ which stresses an unknowingness in how the paintings operate, of working within with a type of informed intuition, to arrive at something which is not definitive only inconclusive. A possibility rather a solution. It is through this indeterminant nature that the paintings find themselves.
Scott McCracken
McCracken is a painter and occasional writer and curator living and working in London. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Turps Art School. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in London and Edinburgh and group exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, Hastings, Manchester, Berlin, Lisbon and Brussels. In 2017 he was awarded the Darbyshire Prize for Emerging Art and in 2019 he was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize.