membership / artist member

Giles Eldridge

http://gileseldridge.weebly.com/index.html
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biography

Giles Eldridge was featured in Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures 2008 at Bloomberg SPACE.

statement

I am interested in doing something with painting and the idea of pictures, working with notions of inconsistency, difference and temporality.

My practice involves a number of connected concerns, working with paintings and drawings. Selected images are re-presented from existing sources to form various fields of reference: Portraits, Political events, Paintings, Sculpture, Architecture, Ethnographic objects etc. In addition to this, abstract imagery is also employed, which forms its own field of reference, where it stands in for the idea of Abstract Painting.

The pictures are made using a variety of techniques and materials within the parameters of the practices of Painting and Drawing. Some works may be detailed graphite drawings whilst others are loose gouache or watercolour paintings. Each work is part of an ongoing fragmented body of works and falls within the two basic categories of canvases and works on paper.

Groupings of works are temporary and contingent where titles may apply to more than one work or installation at any one time.

“Giles Eldridge’s Installation comprises of three arrangements of works whose component elements include small-scale paintings, drawings and Polaroid photographs. Amassed in a constantly expanding archive, Eldridge claims no loyalty to the images he creates, pulled from his archive individual works are grouped, and images become held momentarily at a point of stasis. Ascribing no interconnection, narrative or formal aesthetic to these clustered fragments, the presence of the work, in paradox, precariously testifies to these exact preoccupations. The arbitrary circumstance of their initial invitation from a world of fast-paced visual stimulus reaches epiphany in their endless remix.”

- Charles Danby, press release for 'Faydun Bites', The Agency, London 2009

Charles Danby’s statement points to an important contradiction in the work where the image or picture is at once important and un-important or at least is not the primary aspect. Reconciled opposites form a partial ethos of the work – the opposite of cultural mis-adventure like capitalist endeavour. Groupings of works and titles might be temporary and this is the continuation of an ethos, not through revolution or grand gesture but via an undermining of values with an estranged language.

The function of art practice might be the critique of systems such as language by using it in another form with subtle shifts instead of large-scale theatrics, which simply mimic and support the values of politically orientated culture.

- Giles Eldridge, 2009