Category: Exhibition

https://franceskeevil.com.au/ralph-stanton-looking-for-the-light

Ralph Stanton: Looking for the Light

2 – 13 August 2023

Opening Saturday 5 August 4 – 6 PM

Frances Keevil at Studio W

6 Bourke St Woolloomooloo NSW 2011

This exhibition is a continuation of my last show There’s a Crack in Everything (after Leonard Cohen). These works are a bit more subtle. There’s no obvious crack or rupture in the surface or the picture plane, it’s more like layers of light, glowing through an opaque landscape. It’s more nuanced. It reflects an underlying feeling I have that the light we seek is ephemeral, it appears from behind, from the sides, from above, from below, indirect, yet luminous.

The light is integrated and inherent, rather than something that might be more directly stated. Illumination not via a lightning strike, but rather a glow. I’m interested in the patterns of light as they play out on the texture of the paint’s surface. The painting becomes like a piece of jewelry, an artifact in itself without the need for illustration or to tell a story.

Group show at Saint Cloche Gallery saintcloche.com

Ralph Stanton at Disorder, September – October 2021

“There’s a Crack in Everything (L. Cohen)”

What’s happening?

Good question. What is happening in the world now? Unprecedented, unstoppable global events: a dreadful, pandemic; drastic environmental and climate shocks; a major shift in our freedoms and in global power. And personal tragedies unfolding worldwide at enormous scale.

What are we to make of it all? I am intrigued by the feeling behind Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”: “Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering; There’s a crack , a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in”.

In 2014 I was invited to join in an installation / exhibition at PSAS Fremantle with Geoff Wake and “Zweitgeist” (Tom Muller and Horst Kornberger)  The show, entitled “Dark Light” , comprised site-specific works using neon, projected images and LEDs in the darkened gallery.

My contribution – “Inner Light” – entailed a large, matte black-painted cube, 2.5m3, floating as if weightless upon a soft, gently shifting indirect LED light, which was slowly cycling through the spectrum. This created a seemingly impossible enigma, invoking “the insubstantiality of matter” and a quiet, contemplative mood which expanded into the surrounding space.