I’m standing in front of Paul Edmunds’s Reef, a sculpture described in the Houding exhibition catalogue as “Polystyrene cups, dimensions variable”, when my cellphone rings. I answer it because, except for the gallerist, I’m alone in the echoing room. So normal etiquette doesn’t apply.
The room echoes because it’s basically empty. There are only five works on show: three small bronzes, one linocut, and Reef. Several people have complained to me that there’s not much to look at. Ha, fools, I say to them. Each piece is a universe unto itself. What they really object to is that they’re forced to look at each artwork for a long time. You can’t flit between pieces as you would in a more crowded show, getting an overall impression of style and picking out visual highlights to satisfy yourself. With Edmunds, you either deal with the work, or you don’t bother.
My phone call is from a friend whose partner has just dumped him. As I listen to his litany of sorrows, and stare at Reef, I realise that I don’t care about his pain. Reef is an undulating line of stacked polystyrene cups, lightly glued together, with intricate arrows cut in each cup. Some of the cups still have the faded trademarks from the fast food joints where they originated. The whole is a masterpiece of time poised, a beautiful moment captured just before it crashes and destroys itself. What do I care that my friend’s life is ruined? His grief is the fuel that fires art like Edmunds’s, the grief of having impermanence rammed down your throat.
I try and tell my friend this. “Listen, stop whining, man. You gotta come and check out this sculpture. You’ll stop crying, I promise you.” He slams the phone down, not an easy thing to do with a cell. Ah well, everyone’s a critic.
Gallerist João Ferreira relates a quip made by Alan Alborough, himself a sculptor of the recycled world. “These cups shouldn’t be stuck together at all, it would give the sculpture more tension.” When you’re standing in front of Reef, this is a very funny thing to hear. Any more tension and you’d be sobbing with despair.
Oddly enough, Reef isn’t even the best work on show. The bronzed polystyrene punnets are, perhaps because they are the perfect expression of what I believe Edmunds’s art to be about.
To take something as disposable, as fragile, as the tray your mushrooms come in and then to render that thing solid, to give it a heft associated with weight and an authority associated with being an art object — that is already a notable feat.
But Edmunds has gone much further. The heavy bronze trays have absorbed the qualities of the polystyrene, so that their sturdiness, their sense of presence, is made uncertain. The works hover between a robust expressiveness and a breathtaking fragility and force you to confront the deliquescence encoded into all art forms.
It’s a hard lesson that you have to learn afresh every day and it’s a lesson that Edmunds’s art teaches in the most beautiful way possible.
Houding shows at the João Ferreira Fine Art Gallery, Tel: (021) 423 5403, until December 1