Art First Projects
Alex Knell
Turn On
18th November – 21st December, 2010
Art First Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of new text work & installation by Alex Knell – His first solo show with the gallery.
The tension between opposing desires, and opposing realities, is the principle territory of this exhibition. In this body of work Knell has expanded his fascination with alternative systems of psychology & psychiatry through the recreation of a device conceived by the controversial therapist Wilhelm Reich. The brooding presence of a full-scale Reichian Orgone Energy Accumulator – at once a life-affirming 'healing' contraption and a symbolic sculptural expression of confinement – is a key part of the exhibition's complex and intricately woven context.
The reference to Reich's life & work is both overt (apparent in the physical manifestation of his energy-channelling apparatus) and metaphorical, with Reich's life story standing as an example of a man caught between his own desire for self-expression and institutional censorship – an inner certainty tempered by external fears and scepticism.
This fragile balance is apparent in Knell's print works, where we are presented with surfaces, colour planes and texts that are both exquisitely beautiful and confrontationally elusive. The texts themselves shimmer and disappear before flickering back into focus as the eye struggles to disentangle form from colour. In works such as Flame Can Consume Thought the text emerges from a gradient – increasing in contrast from left to right – giving each individual word a different weight, from ephemeral to leaden in the space of one line. In others, such as And Will Always Be the colour plane behind the text glows brightly, continually disrupting the flow of text and pushing forward the work's formal structure: concentric squares that float and meld with each other.
With these conflicts between form and function – and between internal narrative and external reality – as his medium, Knell crafts the personal observations & contradictions of an inner voice into compelling works, possessed of a bold, unflinching clarity.
