Painting Doesn’t Count features the work of three artists at a similar point in their careers. Having completed, or currently working towards the completion of practice based PhDs, Quin, Bracey and O’Toole’s exhibition marks the first in a series of exhibitions, publications and proposed conferences that examine the relations between Art and Time.
The three artists are members of the Art and Time Research Group, founded by James Quin at LICA (Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts), at Lancaster University. Andrew Bracey, James Quin and M.B. O’Toole present work that responds to, and remediate extant works of art. Bracey re-paints Fra Angelico’s 1441 Florentine fresco, The Mocking of Christ. James Quin repeats images from the library scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 science fiction film Solaris, and M.B O’Toole offers insights into the relations between the space of poetry and painting through a timely interrogation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal 1897 modernist work, Un Coup De Des N’abolira Le Hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance). A work of art is what Andre Malraux described as ‘an object, but it is also an encounter with time’. What connects the objects presented by Bracey, Quin and O’Toole are the ways in which temporality is at work. For all three artists, conversations between simultaneity and succession are in play, combined with a sense that the past is being reconfigured in the present.
The exhibition and catalogue were made possible through LICA research funding.