Patrick Morrisey's interview with Laurence Noga in May 2014

Interview with Laurence Noga concerning recent practice

Natalie Dower: Reflections

This exhibition catalogue was published on the occasion of Natalie Dower’s Reflections exhibition at the Eagle Gallery, London. Images © 2015 Natalie Dower Text © 2015 Laurence Noga Design/typography: Neil Crawford, typoG, London Typeset in Linotype Syntax and Gill Sans Relationships are at the centre of Natalie Dower’s work. They are often coded through rules based on proportion, composed of mathematical puzzles, or phenomenological in terms of a plurality of place. Dower’s approach feels supermodern and constructive. Her ingenuity and innovation are reflected through the use of mathematical systems, such as the ‘Fibonacci Sequence’ or the ‘Dudeney Dissection’, which activate the works’ interwoven surface facture. The awareness of a more terrestrial space synchronises with a systematic field of vision, and allows the parts to function reciprocally

Crash Open Salon

Laurence Noga's painting 'Light green filtered violet' was featured in this group show

'Soft Red Filtered Green', 'Soft Black Filtered Red', 'Soft Green Filtered White', 'Inbetween Violet and Green'. In: From Centre

Four works were exhibited at 'From Centre', an exhibition of reductive abstract works, curated by Saturation Point and Slate Projects. This group show included works by: William Angus-Hughes, Rana Begum, Martin Church, Nathan Cohen, Rhys Coren, Natalie Dower, Judith Duquemin, Julia Farrer, Ben Gooding, Lothar Götz, Hanz Hancock, Tess Jaray, Silvia Lerin, Peter Lowe, Patrick Morrissey, Laurence Noga, Charley Peters, Richard Plank, Giulia Ricci, Carol Robertson, Robin Seir, Steve Sproates and Trevor Sutton

'Boarderline'(Beyond a Rational Aesthetic)

The artists in this group show explore borderlines through a geometry of boundaries. They ask questions about their comfort zones and question the in between through an expanded notion of painting. That expanded notion often takes an intuitive or anti-intuitive position between two conditions, which impacts on the density of surface facture, and allows judgement in breaking of a system

That’s Not What

Laurence Noga's paintings were featured in this group exhibition

Deep Blue Filtered Silver

Paintin

'Borderline' (Beyond a Rational Aesthetic)

The artists in this show explore borderlines through a geometry of boundaries. They ask questions about their comfort zones and question the in between through an expanded notion of painting. That expanded notion often takes an intuitive or anti intuitive position between two conditions, which impacts on the density of surface facture, and allows judgement in breaking of a system. There is a deliberate provocation through flatness uneasily composing itself with what it sits upon, or a mechanistic strategy that is hard won, testing viscosity and matter through protracted physical engagement. The atmosphere and specificity of colour, realign the reading of the works, asking questions of the site as a model for the in between, shifting the idea into material form, asking transformative questions of space and place. Harding, Starling, and Verheul approach their work in a very physical manner testing the behavior of the paint, manipulating a fusion of the material world with the plastic, emphasizing visual hierarchies and allowing the possibility of a physical extension of the works structure. Blannin, Renshaw and Noga test the relationship between the geometry of architectural spaces and the subjective experience of these structures. Applying a carefully modulated approach, they employ an urbanized geometry, like a cartographical assemblage of signs that gradually shift towards a more systematic internal logic or unexpected disturbance. Phenomenological and structural Implications are combined with elements of secrecy and code in the work of Clark, Batchelor and Crossley. Pushing the element of deciphering further through the density of colour relationships, allowing a metaphysical interpretation, allowing a slippage between the image and the space

Imperfect Reverse Curated by Laurence Noga in Collaboration with Saturation Point Projects

Exhibition at Camberwell Space Projects First shown at: Camberwell Space Projects,Camberwell College of Arts,Wilson Road, London,SE58LU. Curated by Laurence Noga in Collaboration with Saturation Point Projects 18 October - 18 November 2016 Toured to:Ruskin Gallery,Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge 24 November 2016 - 21 January 2017 Catalogue - Published on the occasion of the exhibition IMPERFECT REVERSE Curated by Laurence Noga in Collaboration with Saturation Point Projects Designed by Camberwell Press Symposium - Chaired by Laurence Noga.Panel,Estelle Thompson, Emma Hill,Ian Monroe,Katrina Blannin, Natalie Dower

Merge Visible

Ian Goncharov makes paintings that, like Rauschenberg, borrow data from the outside world. He refers to mass and popular culture as seen through a filter of social media – narratives are forced together like scrolling through a Facebook feed, painted in flat, disrupted planes. Each pictorial element exists in its own shallow optical depth, seemingly disconnected from each other in free floating layers. Since the early twentieth century artists have used collage techniques to piece together disparate visual materials to make something new, this practice being made possible by the emergence of technologies that augmented the production and circulation of images. One century later, through the emergence of new media – and the democratisation of these technologies through home computing, smart phones and portable tech – there has been an exponential growth of images, sounds, words and objects generated or disseminated though digital means. Goncharov’s compositions suggest the principles of copy, cut and paste that underpin the transfer of knowledge and visual matter in the Information Age, merging images and cultural genres. Goncharov makes comparisons between his process as a painter and the DJ in Hip Hop, whereby he ‘samples’ images from mass culture and ‘mixes’ them in paintings. We experience the distinct graphic elements not as one holistic image, but as detached compilations of layered subjects and surfaces. Merge Visible brings together a group of British painters who combine multiple visual elements or processes, enabling many fragments of information to be seen simultaneously in one assimilated painted image. They engage with techniques of layering and juxtaposition as a means of exploring the materiality of paint, creating new meaning from disparate forms and disrupting the syntax of pictorial composition. ‘Merge Visible’ is an action in Photoshop whereby separate layers are compressed together to make one unified image. This flattening of pictorial elements into a consolidated viewpoint is symptomatic of our everyday experiences in the contemporary image world, in which a constant stream of rapidly shared simulacra enter our consciousness hundreds of times each day on television, computer and phone screens. In his 1435 treatise on painting, ‘De pictura’ (English: ‘On Painting’) Leon Battista Alberti declared his consideration of the frame of the painting as ‘an open window through which I see what I want to paint.’ Today we are used to seeing multiple windows at the same time, and through them we fluidly experience a stream of pixelated images. We are living at a time when the virtual space of the digital screen is the prevailing means by which we view and understand the world – often seeing several ‘windows’ at once full of images, icons and texts which can all have their own individual temporal, spatial, and aesthetic registers. Within the scope of our vision these disparate components are given meaning in relation to each other, coming together into a perceptual meta-logic. The artists shown in Merge Visible do not execute their work using digital imaging techniques, but instead construct the pictorial experience in similar ways, bringing traditional painterly tropes into dialogue with our experiences of reading space, material and subject in the contemporary image world. The digital environment has influenced the way in which we understand pictorial conventions; the layered logic of Photoshop has affected our comprehension of colour, depth and volume, its painting tools our recognition of a distinct quality of line, and the multitude of windows visible on our computer screens at one time has normalised fragmented spatial composition – all of which relate to the formal considerations that lead to an artist’s application of paint to surface. In our cut-and-paste culture the combination of numerous painterly elements is both symbolic of an ever-generating visual environment and simultaneously transcends it, reinforcing the physical textures and haptic qualities of the painted surface as a contrast to the dematerialised space of the screen. The paintings included in Merge Visible are at once suggestive of our vast yet disembodied relationships with the image in the digital age, yet they remain manifestly ‘painterly’ in nature