Grisaille Daze
Opening Performance: Thursday 6th March from 7 to 9 pm
Exhibition: 7th March to 9th March, 12 to 6pm

T1+2 Gallery is pleased to present the first public outing of PaulMart’s new work Grisaille Daze.

The sculpture, a minimal looking, aluminium structure is designed to facilitate PaulMart’s passage into the world of painting.

On a recent trip to Kassel, Germany, the chance discovery of a Jacob de Wit Grisaille style painting unlocked a connection to PaulMart’s previous work centred on notions of promotion and disappearance within objects associated with the everyday. Grisaille, when considered as a painting style fashionable in the work of seventeenth century Dutch artists, was used to create monochrome trompe l’oeil. The paintings depict classical relief scenes and were used as a cheap decorative option as apposed to real three-dimensional stonework. Colouring of a subject made more demands of an artist, unlike working in grisaille.

The sculpture is centred around a mineral fibre ceiling tile, the like of which can be found in all nature of public and private spaces from supermarkets to offices, football stadiums to … art galleries. The ceiling tile highlights that which seeks to disappear. By its aesthetic nature, its patterning is a scatter, a visual noise to render it invisible to the eye. Its tactic is camouflage. If it were plain it would make a statement, be unapologetic of its minimal form and thus demand recognition. As it is, its design is a pattern to induce invisibility, a daze.

Both the sculpture and the ceiling tile share a modernist seam in that they follow a design perpetuated by their function. Its mini-architecture, a decorative minimalism. Within this mini-architecture an action takes place. PaulMart have designed a formative structure to allow themselves to become ceiling (tile) painters, sincere in their desire to do justice to the ceiling tile whilst admitting they are not skilled painters.

For four days PaulMart will attempt to paint replicas of RCT061, the ceiling tile pattern present in T1+2 Gallery. The result is a shift in the perception of what is important to the artists; it is nothing to do with reaching the summit of painterly perfection and more to do with the artist’s power to promote the previously invisible. In a wider sense, the artists are interested in the mechanisms of late consumer capitalism. By focusing a disproportionate amount of energy attempting to unpick minor pieces of physical ‘stuff’ which has no real presence in our collective vision as a society, they create an anti-spectacle.

PaulMart are the British duo, Paul Teigh and Martin Russell. Currently in their final year of study at Goldsmiths College, they have exhibited within the UK and internationally. Recent shows include Sell Out at Fulham Palace (2007), and The Artist with Two Brains, curated by Chris Hammond (2006). PaulMart have also been selected to exhibit at the Bloomberg Space in March 2008 as part of Art Futures (CAS).