by While we’re here, I think I’ll go for the English breakfast. Or maybe the keftedes – or even the grilled “shieftalia”. Hmm. How about “Hot dogs and French mints”? Or jacket potato with “sausage bolognaise and cheese”? Decisions, decisions. Wait a minute. The menu – red and blue on a white background – is a perfect full-scale copy, including the original lettering, of the tourist menu on display at the Ideal Café in Paphos, Cyprus, repainted by Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou. Presented outside one of the galleries at Goldsmiths CCA, as part of Matt Connors’ Finding Aid exhibition, the menu entices hungry onlookers. The American painter includes 21 other artists in his biggest UK exhibition to date. As long as he is giving us context, the artist tries to enlist and co-opt, increase, confuse and redirect.
Artists often make great curators, whose sensibilities influence their choices and preferences. Don’t expect art historical correctness or the obvious to advance their thinking. Connors’ choices are eclectic, varied and unexpected, just like his own art, with its smooth lines and arcs, its squiggles and swirls of thinly painted colour, its amateurish Rothko riffs, its modern mash-ups of geometric and informal. . Connors’ paintings sometimes look like the kind of inoffensive jaunty abstracts you see adorning hospital walls, or painting hotel room decor alongside the courtyard. He is not afraid of the decoration and the little thing apparently.
Translucent hangings of clear acrylic resin trap leaks of plastic mesh, bursts of color and snarls and bogeys of dried resin into agglutinated surfaces, in a few works by American artist Suzanne Jackson. Like flotsam from the vast garbage patch of plastic trash that drifts the currents of the Pacific Ocean, Jackson’s works float in the air, whipping the wind.
Drawings on paper from the mid-1960s by Patrick Procktor, a contemporary of David Hockney, show leather garments and strange boys in leather, drawn just a year or two before the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK. Siobhan Liddell has a red ceramic handkerchief, with a pattern of small white spots, over a small canvas. If the hanky is a trompe l’oeil gag under the illusion, it is also a sign of the initiated, showing a sharper code of desire. A colored hanky flaunted in the pocket can be all kinds of errant symbolism if you are aware. And here is the beautiful, mirror-like writing of the French artist Guy de Cointet, whose calligraphic lines can be read backwards. “What? I can’t hear a thing!” one reads.
Connors’ own paintings are full of mirroring, reversals, syrupy associations and misdirections of signification. Avoiding the aura of seriousness, Connors sometimes achieves it anyway. The color is punchy even though the paint is thin. Amongst their blips, blobs and planes of flat color, animated by small incidents and accidents, their visual references and misrememberings begin to multiply, and a pattern slowly emerges.
Thousands of shards of glazed pottery, by English art-deco potter Clarice Cliff, are displayed on the table. These broken shards were dredged up from a slag heap built up by the river in Stoke on Trent, just below the windows of the old AJ Wilkinson Royal Staffordshire Pottery, from which the shavings were thrown during Cliff’s time working there . Connors bought this collection of shards at auction, and they have made an illustrated book. Connors Cliff’s painting is also based on the “accidental shortened forms”, some of which have also gone on the shelves of some small fancy cabinets by Ryan Preciado, on which the show is based. Elsewhere, Connors took from one of Robert Cummings stage photographs of hanging cable wedges purporting to depict part of a particle accelerator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the Cummings photographs are never as they appear) as the basis for another painting. .
You begin to see the choices Connors made as a curator as commentators on his own art. The discovery of a large, almost blank canvas by the late British artist Bob Law here is one of the many surprises of the show. A single black line describes a great parallel just inside the edge of the painting, as if a farmer were walking the boundaries of one of his fields. Law made many drawings of fields when he lived in Cornwall, as a kind of conceptual response to the landscape and the work of the St Ives school of painters. Then he settled things down: his 1969 canvas is itself a landscape and a drawing, a demarcation of mental and physical territory.
Connors’ paintings often do that too. It’s easy to see what drew Connors to Miyoko Ito (1918-83), whose densely undulating, quiet paintings are filled with intersecting overlays of forms that fold and flow like patterned fabric over a body. This could also be a landscape. Ito was a member of a group of artists from Chicago who called themselves the Allusive Abstractionists, and it is only recently that their work has begun to be re-examined. Connors was instrumental in making her work better known.
Finding Aid is full of unexpected pleasures. There are no wall labels, and only a slightly confusing exhibition guide, with numbered plans of each of the five galleries, to work out exactly what you’re looking at. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and all art needs context. Without it you wouldn’t know what you were looking at, or even if the art was there at all. It could just be lunch.
• Finding Aid is at Goldsmiths CCA, London, until 2 June
