Profile °26 – JOHN NOEL SMITH

essay by Medb Ruane; intro and interview by Aidan Dunne 

ISBN 978 0946641 925     144 pages (hardback)     22.5x22.5cm     116 illus 

new hardback format, with much larger pagination 

This book is a retrospective look at the work of the abstract painter John Noel Smith. It features and in-depth essay and extensive interview with the artist.  

EXTRACTS

"John Noel Smith is a brilliant painter. There are few people of whom one can say that with any level of certainty. It is also a distinction that is widely disregarded in the contemporary art world, large sections of which tend to regard painting as a black box, a blanket category of activity about which such qualitative judgments are irrelevant. It is as if a painting is purely the sum of its content and no other considerations apply. Yet to say that he is a brilliant painter does mean something in itself. It means that, when we look at one of his paintings, it is easy to recognise that he is completely at home within it. It’s not so much that painting is his natural medium, more that it is his natural element. Perhaps he is not quite at home elsewhere in the world. Just as, over time, the process of evolution brought us out of the water and into the air, so he seems to have evolved to survive in the domain of paint. He is paint-adapted, you could say."

— from the introduction by Aidan Dunne

"A curious subbtext happens within these patterned works: repetition mimics replication, which brings an odd twist. Singular, hand-made, one-off paintings are playing with the politics of mass reproduction, happening on massive, previously unimaginable scales in the world outside. They’re appearing to contain the uncontainable. Repetition becomes a way of marking time and imagining a time beyond, winding up an aesthetic clock that ticks, ticks, ticks. Scale and structure build its face, using patterned marks as features. You can’t say where one element starts and the other fades: irregularities upset the play with consistency, happening otherwise. Yet the time of the painting is not identical to the moment of art. We speak more of the memory of a painting than about the painting itself when we talk about art, because, put simply, you can’t look at a painting forever. What strikes you over time, if you remember, is not what you saw; it’s something else. This way of experiencing painting and art is set up in different ways. The play with patterning and repetition arguably paves the way for Smith’s explorations of what he calls the ‘united field’. The words matter. It’s about the field of painting, of art, referencing explorations from the mid-20th century on."

— from the essay by Medb Ruane

"I delight in counterpoint. These works, while internally coherent, set out to challenge the integral image we have of ourselves. While we are continually told we live in a global economy, we are, at the same time, localising politically and culturally. I think this fracture has to be dealt with in the visual arts. I’m not interested here in integrating or fusing the various elements together. Rather, my intention is to set up the whole field of the canvas as a coherent structure, every part exercising the necessary pressure on the other. My stratagem is to shift the emphasis away from a single, central, dominant idea to a flotilla of interrelated fluid concepts, which add up to a Gesamtbild, one which is about potential cohesion and lucidity as opposed to fragmentation and incoherence, hopefully recovering a sense of integrity in the process."

— John Noel Smith in conversation with Aidan Dunne