Andrew Black and Tony Swain @ The Duchy

The Duchy’s annual pairing of artists at different stages of their career, Aereated Bread Company presents work by Andrew Black, a recent Painting and Printmaking graduate of Glasgow School of Art and Tony Swain, a Glasgow-based artist who represented Scotland at the 2007 Venice Art Biennale and recently showed at The Fruitmarket, Edinburgh.

A flask (Object, 2011) and its representation (Flask, 2011) appear as one of a group of works by Black that anchor the physical presence of things with their painted representations, conjuring up an alternate visual and spatial experience. Black’s three-dimensional pieces occupy focal positions in the gallery - the flask(s) positioned to be visible at angles from the entrance - alongside a stick protruding from the ground, almost as if asking to be looked at anew. 

As in many of his previous works, Swain uses newspapers, playing with the potential and constraint of its size and pre-existing configuration of images, text and meanings. Layering, obscuring and altering them through paint and collage, he transforms a material laden with representations of everyday reality into landscapes that look out into tangential and fictive imaginations. 

Concerns which unfold from the pairing of these two artists are; painting as a contemporary medium of representation, and the use of everyday occurrences and materials as emotional and physical spaces for intuitive and ambiguous gestures to occur. The exhibition seems to be an exploration of these concerns, not only visually but also as a platform to break down exhibition conventions. As subsequent pairings take place, it will be interesting to examine the exchanges between the artists and the impact of curatorial decisions on the artistic process. [Magdalen Chua]