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Hotel Minerva

4 Sep—3 Oct 2009

Graham Chorlton: 'Hotel Minerva'
Curated by Matt Price

artists

Graham Chorlton

Master Piper is pleased to present 'Hotel Minerva', the first solo exhibition at a London commercial gallery by Birmingham-based painter Graham Chorlton. The exhibition is curated by writer, editor and curator Matt Price. You can download Matt's exhibition essay here.

Chorlton’s depictions of the interiors and exteriors of buildings, architecture, civil engineering, cityscapes and landscapes are both anonymous and familiar – places we think we might know, or may once have been. They could almost be of anywhere – a factory in rural Poland, a bridge in the suburbs of Chicago, a car park on the outskirts of Paris or Berlin perhaps. In a way, it doesn’t even really matter. While some are of places the artist has passed almost every day for years, they are generic, quotidien, archetypal structures from different eras of the modern world, physical manifestations of our daily need to manufacture things, to work, to get around, to be somewhere for a while.

'Hotel Minerva' (2007), the work that lends the exhibition its name, is of a hotel in Switzerland in which Chorlton has never stayed. His only encounter with it is through an old postcard he once found – a postcard that reveals little information about the hotel, only that it is in Lugano, or once was. While not a particularly distinctive building, it has a grandeur and charm of its own, and may once have been the most modern and stylish place to stay in the area. The nostalgia of a vintage postcard, celebrating the local hot spots of yesteryear, is carried forward in Chorlton’s painting as a memory that was never experienced. For many British people at the time the hotel was built and the postcard printed, continental Europe was a far-away dream, a holiday destination only for the rich and glamorous – a European imaginary before the days of budget airlines. Hotel Minerva captures this sense of longing through the filter of Swiss modernist architecture.

Often depicted at night and almost always without the presence of people, a sense of melancholy pervades Chorlton’s work – a gentle feeling of detachment and anomie that places the artist as a solitary onlooker, an observer on the outside looking in. Even with interior scenes such as Pub (2008) and Bar (2007) it is as if we are there after hours, a witness or passing stranger rather than a participant or an invited guest. While this sense of estrangement is enhanced by the forthright linearity and accomplished draughtsmanship of Chorlton’s works, they are rarely cold or devoid of humanity. The subtle and complex use of colour matched by a sensitive range of brush marks brings a warmth and curiosity to these buildings and locations – one that invites narrative readings of the work, both cinematic and literary.

In addition to having exhibited in East International, Norwich, John Moores, Liverpool, and at Ikon, Birmingham, Chorlton has had solo shows at venues such as the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, University College, Worcester, and the Library Gallery, University of Warwick. He was recently awarded first prize for painting in both the Leamington Gallery Open and The Birmingham Open at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. He was also awarded the De Vere’s Prize at the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition, Dublin, in 2007.

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Graham Chorlton: Hotel Minerva

It’s a strangely melancholy place, Hotel Minerva. Today it is overcast, perhaps even stormy, with that peculiar bright light that only seems to come with the darkest clouds. On a summer’s day it must look quite resplendent, showing off its high modernist curves and balconies in the sunshine like a cruise liner on the Adriatic. At the time it was built, it must have been the grandest building on the block, a monument to concrete elegance and international tourism.

Of course, those were the days before budget airlines and package holidays, when most people in Britain could only dream of continental holidays and European style. It was a place of haute couture, of unknown royal dynasties, of jigsaw puzzle castles and yachts, of chocolate box lakes and mountain ranges, grand historic buildings, expensive jewellery, the best restaurants, fine wine, racetracks, sports cars and casinos. This romanticised vision of the continent is reflected in Chorlton’s paintings Casino I and II (2009) – an evening in Monte Carlo with the fairy lights and fountains shimmering beneath the shadowy façade of an imposing casino. The excitement, the glamour, the romance of a holiday in the French Riviera!

Graham Chorlton has never been to a casino in Monte Carlo nor stayed at Hotel Minerva – indeed, his only encounter with the hotel is through an old postcard he once found. The painting is not a document of one of his own memories or experiences, just an imagined destination filtered through a reproduction, a record of someone else’s souvenir. As a result of this step remove and by means of his bleak yet endearing rendering of the building, Chorlton’s painting somehow manages to capture the British imaginary of continental Europe of yesteryear and a sense of longing for places we may never know.

The postcard reveals little about the hotel. All we know is that it is somewhere in Lugano in Switzerland, or once was. The petrol sign outside the front entrance suggests Hotel Minerva is on one of those mainland European roads that seem like a motorway but are by the side of a lake, or on the seafront, or a vertiginous cliff face. Such roads somehow seem too wide and the traffic too fast for their setting, and are far from accommodating to foreigners on foot. The hotel and its position on the road evoke a sense of this being an in-between location, of being en route somewhere else. It’s a recurrent theme in Chorlton’s oeuvre – we are only ever on the way.

This is perhaps articulated most literally in Road (2007) in which the viewer looks down at a blue van making its way along a country road. Here we are watching the process of travelling, of being in transit from somewhere to elsewhere. It’s unclear whether the scene is depicted by day or by night – whether the acute shadows cast are from sunshine, streetlights or moonlight. The van drives on the right hand side of the road, so it’s clear the scene is not in the UK. The landscape, rendered darkly and with an economy of painterly means, gives few clues, though has something more of the American landscape than that we might associate with Europe.

As with both Hotel Minerva and Road, in Garage (2008) the artist and viewer are similarly located on one side of a road, looking across. Like a hotel, a garage is a building that is visited only for a short period of time – simply a means to another end. The architecture of the garage is more utilitarian than that of Hotel Minerva, a design that is probably repeated in its hundreds, if not thousands, across Britain and Europe. It’s generic – we could be almost anywhere. Chorlton depicts the garage at night, the lights of the forecourt glowing blue and reflected in the road in front, as if in a river or stream. Small spots of bright blue-white light punctuate the picture plane, somewhere between stars, lights and reflections on a camera lens, serving to bring a luminescent haze to the scene, capturing the glare of the garage’s bright lights against the night sky. While the painting speaks of solitude, of being a late-night passer-by looking on from the shadows on the other side of the road, the lights tell of the comfort afforded by the 24-hour garage, a place where you can find someone to help, should you ever need it.

Unlike Hotel Minerva, the garage is located in a place that Chorlton knows well. It’s a garage he passed almost every day for many years on his way to work on the Bristol Road in Birmingham. One of a series of works of the Bristol Road produced in 2008, several of which are included in the exhibition, it opens up a dichotomy between known and unknown buildings and locations in Chorlton’s work. The fact that Chorlton is familiar with the garage scene and yet it could be almost anywhere is significant for penetrating Chorlton’s paintings and his approaches to the built environment. In part it is about architectural types that reflect different periods of the modern era – Hotel Minerva looks like it is from the early 1960s while the garage looks like it might have been built in the 1970s or 80s. They both encapsulate their time of construction rather than their place, their geographical location. It almost doesn’t matter where they are – they are simply buildings that function somewhere for a while, some outlasting others and leaving their imprint from a past time on the present.

At the same time, Chorlton’s practice is a conversation between different levels of observation and experience of buildings and structures, a dialogue between familiarity and detachment, engagement and estrangement. We may pass a building every day and yet observe little about it, while on the other hand, we may visit a far away building just once and be left with a vivid impression of its form and details. We have many kinds of psychological and emotional relationships with buildings and architecture, and Chorlton’s paintings offer an understated yet sophisticated insight into such dynamics. It’s a curious combination in which concrete mixes with perception, aesthetics interact with memories and paint becomes intertwined with the self.

Continuing the theme of travel or of being on a journey is Bridge (2008). Another nocturnal scene of the Bristol Road, and again depicted from what seems to be one side of a road (the darkness yields little information) the subject of the painter’s focus here is what looks to be a railway bridge stretching over the road. The muted browns, beiges and greys suggest a slightly run-down area. As with Garage, there is a mildly menacing undercurrent to the painting – it could be dangerous round here, but as before, the glow of light hitting the bridge is somehow reassuring. A second image, Bridge No.2 (2008) has a similar atmosphere, but this time with what looks like a footbridge spanning the road below. In this work, Chorlton treats acrylics almost as watercolours, using only a very limited amount of pigment to convey a complicated pictorial space – just a little colour and very few brush marks communicate both the physical environment and the ambience of the scene.

The two bridge paintings are un-peopled. There’s nobody around. Perhaps it’s really late at night. Perhaps it was just a moment when no one was passing. But then it dawns that none of the paintings in the exhibition feature people. In fact, they are notable by their absence. Even the two interiors – Bar (2007) and Pub (2008) – have no signs of life. It’s as if we are there after hours, whether with or without permission. The absence of figures makes the bar and pub seem like theatre stages, spaces in which action has or may yet take place.

Indeed, a strong sense of narrative is implied in Chorlton’s paintings – narratives that are more often cinematic than theatrical. The bar looks like it could be the location for a scene in a 1960s or 70s film – a stylish, modernist, futuristic bar waiting for characters to enter and the plot to evolve. While the bar has something quite European about it (as it happens it’s the bar from inside Hotel Minerva), the pub looks more specifically British – a type of drinking house that is fading away as contemporary refurbs and cosmopolitan bars gradually replace them. While the bar is an imagined place interpreted from a postcard, the pub is one Chorlton has sat in many times, and watched its décor change over the years. It is the kind of pub that could be a setting in any number of films or television programmes at any point in the last half a century. It’s strange what dates and what doesn’t, what can evolve and what has to be replaced. Rather than being a protagonist in these scenes, Chorlton assumes the role of narrator, cinematographer, scenographer or director, and places us in the same position.

Even more than cinema and TV, though, Chorlton’s works exude a sense of literary narrative, like images created in the mind in response to reading fiction. The darkness, sadness and vaguely threatening locations are evocative of detective novels, thrillers and murder mysteries. One could easily imagine Philip Marlowe – Raymond Chandler’s regular lead character – featuring in Chorlton’s paintings, or seeing the locations depicted through the enigmatic American private detective’s eyes. Chorlton is a great admirer of Chandler’s writing along with other detective authors such as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and their influence is clear on his painting. It’s a combination of suspense and intrigue, mixed with something poetic and emotionally charged that lend the paintings their fiction-like qualities, and this goes some way towards explaining how it is possible for the locations to be both anonymous and meaningful simultaneously. Places we don’t know can suddenly become charged through a piece of information about them, or by being exposed to something that takes place within them.

And this comes back to the idea of our psychological relationships with buildings. What might be just any old building that we pass on a daily basis, such as Riverside (2004) or Factory (2008) can take on a whole new significance through connections we make to the building, whether this is by means of the building becoming a site for something out of the ordinary such as through an episode in a novel, or by having cause to engage with the building on a personal level in real life. For the workers of the factory, they will inevitably have a complex array of emotions and feelings about the place in which they work, and even more so if the factory has closed down, as this former motorcycle factory on the Bristol Road has. Buildings become injected with meaning through use and through human activity, and locations become loaded with significance if we have reason to engage with them. What Chorlton presents us with are scenes that open up our liminal space, our focused consciousness and contemplation, to buildings and our constructed environment – contexts that set us up to consider our formal responses to places we might not know and that compel us to speculate about the infinite possible events, conversations, interactions and activities for which they are sites.

What unites the places and buildings that Chorlton knows and those he does not is the notion of the imagined – the process of projecting thoughts and ideas onto and into architecture and its surroundings. The imaginary is often inspired by the aesthetics of the architecture itself, such as in Sweden Builds I and II (2007), whereby two sizeable concrete structures are rendered in subtle glazes of paint, almost like watercolour washes. The technique softens the hard edges of the buildings, and allied with the bleached, slightly washed out colours, brings a sense of nostalgia and of fading memories to the images. As with Hotel Minerva, these are buildings Chorlton has never been to, but only seen through reproductions in an ageing book on Swedish modernist architecture. They could be almost any kind of building – museums or bus stations, law courts or telephone exchanges. When pressed, Chorlton reveals that they are a civic building and a shopping centre, but this information is sort of surplus to requirements in Chorlton’s mind. The interest is in imagining their purpose, in not quite knowing, or in not having to know.

The sense of time having passed invites the viewer to wonder what the world was like when they were built, and, indeed whether they still exist. Chorlton’s paintings ask two sides of the same question about buildings, locations and people: how do buildings and places change through time in response to society’s use for them, and how do people’s uses of buildings and places change over time? What Chorlton’s paintings present to the viewer is only ever a transitory moment – an image of the present at the crossroads of the past and the future, a temporal intersection in a physical space. As with Border (2009) it’s not surprising that so many of the actual places Chorlton depicts are in-between places, junctions, bridges, roads, railways, no man’s lands. It’s about us moving through the world and time passing, a study of us going about the daily things we do while fashions, styles, generations and eras come and go around us. It’s a question of progress and memory, the past and imagination, what changes and what remains. All of these things are reflected in the built environment and captured, for those who take the time to see, in Chorlton’s work. So come make a reservation at Hotel Minerva, book yourself a room with a balcony and ensuite – even without staying you’ll remember it forever…

Matt Price