David Batchelor: I-Cons and Ex-cons

Kestle Barton is excited to open this 2023 season with an exhibition of recent work by London-based artist, David Batchelor, entitled I-Cons and Ex-Cons (March 25 – June 11). This collection of work brings colour to the foreground in playful and imaginative forms.

Batchelor’s concrete poems return us to our primal instinct to play, conjuring a cacophony of voices, and connections; a breathless story told by a child with a run of conjunctions instead of full stops: and then, and then, and then. […] And it is this spirit of invention, of free association, which makes the energy of these works so infectious and their final form so covetable. (Eleanor Nairne, 2022)

Kestle Barton is excited to open this 2023 season with an exhibition of recent work by London-based artist, David Batchelor, entitled I-Cons and Ex-Cons (March 25 – June 11). This collection of work brings colour to the foreground in playful and imaginative forms.

Since 2011, Batchelor has been developing a wide range of sculptures collectively titled Concretos.

The first of these was inspired by seeing a low cement wall embedded with shards of coloured glass in Sicily. Since then, Batchelor has been making works in which brightly coloured objects – glass fragments, plastic off-cuts, paint tin lids, studio detritus and found objects of one kind or another – are set into a simple rectangular concrete base.

The works began as small, improvised, shelf-based sculptures, and over the last decade have expanded and grown into free-standing structures, some over three metres tall.

The title I-Cons and Ex-Cons refers to studio shorthand for the larger and more recent works in the series: the Inter-Concretos and the Extra-Concretos. A group of these works will be placed throughout the gallery at Kestle Barton.

In addition a new work made from hundreds of off-cuts from earlier Perspex sculptures but without a concrete base – a Non-Con – will be shown in front of one of the gallery windows, so that the coloured fragments are illuminated from behind and glow like an improvised stained glass window.

Batchelor has been making colour-based works in a variety of media for over three decades. Since the early 1990s, his sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, installations and animations have all aimed to draw attention to aspects of colour, and urban colour in particular. Rather than being an aspect of some other concern, in these works colour is its own presence, the centre and subject of the work.

In Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), Batchelor argued that, in the West, since antiquity, vivid colour has often been treated as inessential or cosmetic, and regarded as feminine or oriental, infantile, narcotic or kitsch. In all his work Batchelor aims to disturb this assumption, and to draw attention to an area of experience that is both entirely familiar and deeply strange.

Image: David Batchelor
Inter-Concreto 08
2019

Found painted timber, plexiglass and concrete
1050 x 610 x 60 mm