Nostalgia of Distance by John Atherton
Nordic Art Agency | Malmö
Nostalgia of Distance – John Atherton
through 5 May 2023
Nordic Art Agency, Stora Nygatan 56, Malmö, Sweden
John Atherton is a Scottish artist who attended the Glasgow School of Art & Design and the Royal College of Art, London. Atherton is a screen-print artist whose current artist practice focuses on abstract portraiture. Each layered paper collage begins with a screen-printed black and white portrait. Atherton discovered a series of discarded high school yearbooks from the 1970s filled with rows of anonymous images of graduating students. These small portraits are pivotal moments in these school graduates’ lives and Atherton selects those who draw his curiosity as the foundation behind his abstract portraiture.
” The yearbook symbolises a rite of passage, a point of departure, it captures a moment of infinite possibility, the imminent journey to an unknown destination. My work is screen printed onto different papers and collaged together but I think of myself as a painter, the piles of paper, my colour palette. These layers of materials and imagery embody a vast hinterland of narratives and creative ideas that echo back to the yearbook. The creative journey and the personal narratives are encoded in the stratification of materials with only the most recent layer fully visible.” – John Atherton
At first sight, the series of new portraits from Nostalgia of Distance are to be appreciated entirely in the realm of pure visual abstraction and the pleasures of viewing carefully composed colour and form. However, counter-intuitively to this tradition, Atherton’s work emerges not from the lineage of abstract art but from that of portraiture through the commemorative representations found in the yearbook.
Historically a distant landscape depicted in a portrait painting informs the viewer of a sense of nostalgic contemplation in the sitter. It is with this in mind that Atherton suggests a perceptual shift, that his abstract works could be interpreted by the viewer as a scene through a picture frame window. The nostalgic contemplations of the sitter are inventions conceived by the viewer, as they unravel the abstract ambiguity of the work.
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