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It is an inexorable fact that every work of art is a response in some
form. Irish artist Brendan Earley has created works in response to Beijing,
where he was an artist-in-residence at Galerie Urs Meile last year. One
might hazard the suggestion that Beijing is a city that is particularly
difficult to elucidate. Its traffic, human and mechanical; layers of
habitation—frequently temporary but sheltered from the uncomfortable
climate by rapid-set concrete; endless breakage, dirt, and repair;
consumption and competition; fragments sculpted into language and undivided
skies of blue or grey revolving between day and neon-infected night above
altering horizons. It is a city that incites one to operate rather than
contemplate.
This might be one description of the place Earley
entered with the express awareness that cities penetrate the consciousness
of their inhabitants until they themselves are assimilated into the urban
fabric as "fractional embodiments" of it. In what is a notably cogent
exhibition text, he acknowledges a shift by which humans no longer adapt to
their habitat, but change it to suit to themselves. Yet in Beijing, the
environment is such that people are forced to adapt: these artworks reflect
on that reconciliation, standing somewhat tentatively amidst an accelerated
and saturated city.
Earley is focused on form, or rather
its "cavity," as a way of comprehending urban structure; its liminal stages
are examined here mainly through drawing. Felt-tip marks accumulate
relentlessly in I Wait for Sleep #1 and #2 (all works 2012).
What becomes an architecture of little vertical lines in these works
ascends towards lighter registers of ink, implying the entrance of light
through an opening, perhaps of a dome; a single circular hole cut bravely
in each sheet of paper from which the marks flee in their furtive, mimetic
legion "reinforces the absence," or so the artist tells us in his
statement. A palpable sense of abstract endeavor informs the works (Earley
was heavily jetlagged when composing them), which is not to deny their
wrought tension, as the method of application remains deliriously unbroken
over thousands of strokes. A third, larger felt-tip work lends its title to
the exhibition as a whole, In the Midnight City. Here, the lines
assume a flattened circular pattern decreasing towards the center in an at
once seething and languid vortex shape.
On the concrete
floor is a carefully assembled, sparse arrangement of sculptures;
non-invasive, but at the same time slightly isolating. In place of the
physical presence one usually expects from sculpture is a sensation closer
to hearing, as if a low hum were emanating from somewhere. That said, the
most memorable amongst them—Day for Night and Midnight
Man—have a vaguely anthropomorphic character where supports
pushing up from the floor hold fluorescent tubes in a vertical arrangement
cloaked in blue filter paper. Midnight Man is the more untidy of the
two, with an electrical cable hanging down. The artist seems unconcerned by
this, however, lending a state of slight unevenness or fragility to the
work. These sculptures might be also likened to candles or torches; one is
then led to ask, in a more metaphorical vein, what they might serve to
illuminate? Compelling though they might be, however, they are also
remarkably neutral.
Such is the shape of Earley's response to
Beijing—profoundly elusive and fragmented. On the one hand, one has a
lasting impression of a duality between the erratic pen strokes and the
cool assemblage of fragile lights and brittle colored sheets. A certain
sublimity permeates the show, along with a sense of refinement divorced
from the cacophony of the city—especially the migrant village area
where the artist was living during the residency. But perhaps in his
pursuit of "absence" these works indicate a form of withdrawal from this
great urban mass. The artist certainly has applied himself intensely in
creating these dense drawings and highly formal sculptures, which in their
final turn hit a sense of the infinite—or of want. Such a state might
also mimic the individual's passage through a contemporary megacity,
oscillating between harried engagement and escape.
Iona
Whittaker is a London-born art critic and editor based in Beijing
since 2009. She is Editor at the independent magazine Randian.
 
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