Inchmore Gallery, nr, Beauly, Inverness, until 30 May 2012

MARK Lomax’s latest exhibition, Discarded Thoughts, successfully expands his practice in its engagement with new materials and techniques, presenting a very fluid relationship between sculptural, painterly and conceptual elements.

SINCE the artist’s last solo show, Ephemera at Inchmore Gallery in July 2008, Lomax’s work has continued to evolve, combining a variety of disciplines in his exploration of altered maps and books. While this latest body of work is thematically consistent, it strides out into new territory in terms of scale and materials, feeling somewhat contained by the current exhibition space.

Mark Lomax, The Underlying Substance of things as opposed to their Attributes

Discarded Thoughts (printed paper, paint, filler and glue), a linear series of 16 crumpled forms or ideas, is a pure marriage of process and object. It is also the starting point for an exhibition that moves progressively from the embryonic concealment of these closed forms to reveal the inner life of human imaginings dormant or forgotten. Intricate layers of paper, filler, pigment and glue are built and excavated on a ground of shaped aluminium metal, fragments of human consolation through text and diagram breaking through the surface.

This fluid consciousness is characteristic of an artist that consistently reflects the human condition not in terms of absolutes but the elusive nature of knowledge. This shifting reality is visualised and experienced in Lomax’s choice and handling of materials. The artist’s use of collaged text and drawn images from discarded encyclopedias and reference books are combined with successive layers of evocative texture.

The presence of this found material is perhaps an interesting reference to a tactile tradition of inherited knowledge increasingly absent in a digital age. Surfaces are coated, scratched and filled, blurring the distinction between drawn, found and organic marks. Form is shaped from malleable light-weight metal, with the later addition of thin washes of acrylic paint. This stain of pigment cleverly accentuates the contours of form in each work and provides often delicate patination of the surface, inviting a variety of interior readings.

Mark Lomax, A Minor Role in Something More Important

In Monocline,for example the colouration feels delicately leached rather than applied, creating a subtly varied and nuanced emotive surface, while in The Underlying Substance of Things As Opposed to Their Attributes painting enhances the dynamism and rhythm of the whole composition. This expressive and painterly quality is particularly evident in The Belief That Things Can Change. Here subtle tonal gradations and abstracted geometric forms are overlaid on fragments of text and thought. The choice of text book with its “rational functions”, “complex functions as transmissions”, equations and exercises is strangely emotive, revealing a methodology of scientific thought with hope at its core. The artist colours our reading of this layered material in form and hue, together with the chosen title as potent triggers of association.

Elevation of The Incidental is equally humane in its abstract visualisation of human knowledge and memory emerging from beneath the surface. Two beautiful smaller scale framed constructions, Polynominals and Illustrated Point (Printed paper, paint and filler on recycled metal) reach out of the frame, physically and psychologically, begging closer inspection.

The impermanent material of paper immortalised in metal, the texture of the background evocative of a found site in grain, line and mark are combined with techniques of collage, assemblage, painting and sculpture to produce a highly ambiguous sculptural objects. The structure and detail of these works are finely executed, while the manner of display demands consideration of discarded or incomplete elements of human thought and aspiration.

A Minor Role In Something More Important feels very much like an idea unfurled in its arc-like form, the contrast between its shiny metallic interior and corroded outer surface reflecting the artist actively pushing the boundaries of his own technique.

Mark Lomax, The True Nature of Being

The potential for larger scale “painted sculptures and sculpted paintings” is certainly suggested by this show, together with the possibility of such work being seen in a variety of different contexts, including outdoors. The True Nature of Being (Industrial Mixed Media) is a good example; a hung piece that looms off the wall as an eternal question into the viewer’s physical and imaginative space, equally effective outdoors as a floating sculpture. Seen in the current exhibition, this work is richly evocative of human origins, with its yellow ochre and charcoal-like pigmentation as if marked by fire and ritual. A central white elliptical form like a piece of found prehistoric art or graffiti is mysterious and provocative. The inner life of the work creative process visualised as an elusive and essential quest for completion and perhaps even redemption.

Lomax’s work is stimulatingly cryptic and immediately tactile in its cross-disciplinary approach. There is something quietly subversive about this work which is appealing in a world of contemporary art addicted to the screamingly obvious. Driven by the artist’s exploration of new techniques and materials this latest exhibition displays exciting signs of evolution that will no doubt contribute to further distillation of the artist’s visual language in future exhibitions.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Discarded Thoughts
• Inchmore Gallery