Splashy Sublime | Nick Archer at Long & Ryle
Nick Archer, Two Tribes (Snowball Fight), oil on canvas, 122 x 97cm. Courtesy of Long & Ryle
In 1996 Nick Archer, aged 33, a Yorkshire-bred Leeds Poly Art School graduate, was accepted onto the RA Schools programme. The course suited him fine. The students were encouraged to work from observation, and Archer – having finished at Leeds in 1986 – had since attended a decade’s-worth of life-drawing classes at night school in London. He’d done his 10,000 hours.
At the beginning of his second year, the Academy held the famous Sensation exhibition in its main galleries upstairs from the RA Schools studios, featuring YBOs like Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, the Chapman brothers and Sarah Lucas.
“The [course] changed overnight”, he remembers, in a recent interview to publicise his latest solo show at Long & Ryle, Transience. Conceptualism was coronated, as the new millennium approached: new tutors were brought in; new working practices encouraged. “I had the best of both worlds,” he says. He didn’t abandon figuration entirely, thankfully, but he adapted his style, blending in elements of abstraction.
Before enrolling at the RA, Archer had been funding his art practice by working as a specialist decorator in London. After the course had finished, in 1999, he went full time, developing a signature style, splashing paint onto canvases laid on the floor, then, once they’d halfway dried, affixing them onto the wall and ‘weaving’ in figurative images, often inspired by old photographs or collected vintage postcards. The first stage of this method created haphazard shapes, though the pigments were carefully chosen to combine clashing complementary colours.
A move to East Sussex enhanced his love of landscape, and his splurgy backgrounds increasingly took on the shapes of trees and mountains, evoking the works of Casper David Friedrich and Peter Breughel the Elder: a splashy sublime. Francis Bacon’s ‘happy accidents’ were a constant inspiration. Hovering too were images from the films of his favourite film directors, purveyors of deftly woven darkness such as David Lynch and Tim Burton. Akira Kurosawa, too.
His most exciting pieces in the latest Long & Ryle show explore the compositional relationship of figures with the landscapes around them, a la Peter Doig, or Michael Andrews. Fragile human subjects take centre stage; lurking menace waits in the wings. In Race for the Shadows, a posse of cowboys gallop frantically away from an apocalyptic hellscape; in Pond a young lad leaps – or does he fall? – from a rowing boat, towards a glassy pool, about to shatter the reflection of a mangled, Nashian tree; in Two Tribes, pictured above, two groups of snowball-throwing children face up in lines, like Napoleonic soldiers, as the sky above erupts in angry shades of blue and purple. The war in the sky looks real.
This is Archer’s second solo show at Long & Ryle, his UK representatives. He is also represented by Christine Park in New York and Gowen Contemporary in Geneva. His work has been shown in Moscow, Paris, Tokyo and San Francisco. This exhibition, which runs until January 12, will stay in your head for weeks. If you make an art-related trip to Pimlico this winter, I suspect it will detain you longer than the Sarah Lucas show round the corner at Tate Britain.