Posted on
2013-05-06
The work of Richard Woods traverses the boundaries between art, architecture and design in an on-going examination of the relationship between the functional and the ornamental. The everyday surfaces that surround us provide the canvas onto which the artist transposes elements from the vernacular of traditional urban design. His architectural interventions toy with perception and reality, manipulating and transforming the facades and interiors of existing structures through the application of synthetic fronts or ‘logos’: galleries become mock-Tudor houses, City Hall security booths red brick-castles, and cloistered Venetian courtyards crazy-paved suburban patios. His simplified, stylised facades poke fun at our aesthetic values, both mocking and paying homage to the cult of renovation and DIY. His distilled encasements impose new values on the buildings they occupy, contrasting the urban with the rural, the old with the new, and the congested with the minimal. Each installation challenges us to confront the way in which we construct our surroundings, and probes the irrevocable artificiality of our local environment.
Woods’ site-specific installation at the Alan Cristea Gallery will comprise interior floor and wall coverings in his trademark vibrantly-coloured and exaggerated wood-grain motif. Deceptively simple in form, these bold images are produced using traditional block-printing techniques and installed as parquetry (inlaying wood in geometric patterns). Pre-occupied with the notion of reproduction, the techniques employed by Woods allude to historical artisanal processes, the power of iconography and the dominance of consumerist plasticity. As is the case with much of Woods’ work, the method of construction is appropriate to the surface he is mimicking, articulating the similarities between the artist’s methodology and materials, and those used in everyday situations.
Exhibition runs through to June 1st, 2013
Alan Cristea Gallery
31 & 34 Cork Street
London
W1S 3NU
www.alancristea.com
