Strange Windows (the found and forgotten)

Laurence Noga

Exhibition: 11 November – 10 December 2022
Artist Talk: Thursday 8 December 2022, 6-7.30pm.

Standpoint Gallery presented Strange Windows (the found and forgotten), a series of assemblages, paintings and mixed-media works by Laurence Noga.

The arrangements and compositions within Laurence Noga’s (b.1961, UK) paintings and constructions evolve through an open approach, reliant on a human response to the mysterious and forgotten.

Many elements in the work are sourced from his father’s systematic collection of objects and memorabilia - tools, packets, sheet music, washers, menus, books and photographs. Noga allows this mixture of media to act as a catalyst in his approach and explores a personal iconography and phenomenology, and how that can be important within both memory and place. For example, the look and feel of his mother’s musty sheet music from her time as a jazz vocalist in clubs and dance bands, or the crumpled menus (with handwritten changes) from the Caprice restaurant where his father worked for many years.

Noga is drawn towards the intangible and intimate nature between painting, collage, and assemblage, exploring and utilising unexpected combinations of multi-level colour and surface construction. Physical processes fluctuate between instinctive decisions (often with collage) and the unpredictability/predictability of colour relationships. The systems are operational developing from the way each set of work is created. The colour is built up through close tones in an intimate and personal way, through transparency and opacity, allowing the surface of the paint to permeate structure.

The material investigation develops the use of hidden and ambiguous content. Collage is significant because it can be applied very fast (mounted onto panels) increasing the object quality, and drawing the audience into a small, peripheral world of imperfect geometries. Layers of acrylic, collage, canvas, and found items, are combined in grids and pattern in a semi intuitive process, often disbursed, or used in compartments, to create a deliberate and odd depth of field. As seen in works such as Deep Grey Filtered Pink (2021) and Soft Green Filtered Blue (2022).

This experimental environment created by Noga can use a proliferation of systems and a sense of history. Approaches develop from both collective and individual memories and how this can unpack an ongoing approach to exploring spatial memory.

Laurence Noga (b.1961, UK) studied at Wimbledon School of Art in 1984 and completed his post graduate studies at Byam Shaw, Central St Martins. He was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2018 and exhibits widely. Noga lectures for the University of the Arts London (UAL) at Camberwell College of Arts. He belongs to the APT community of artists in South London.