Delighting in flotsam
Laura Gascoigne
Eric Rimmington Scalar Fine Am 35 Bruton Place, London WI, until 28 November
Ies a strange irony of the throwaway society that objets Iron yes — 'found objects' — should now be treasured as art. For many of us this is a tough one to swallow, even in French. After all, we all
collect things. Leave us on a beach for a day and which of us won't come home with a stone, a shell, a funny-shaped bit of driftwood? So when such things are presented to us as art our natural tendency is to think: 'Big deal!' But when they're not just presented, but represented, we're inclined to treat them with rather more respect.
The still-life painter Eric Rimmington has always had a fondness for odds and sods: curiosities picked up on beaches, in street markets, even on the street. In the 1960s and 1970s he made assemblages, but today he assembles his objects on a shelf and paints them. They come, as objects will, in all shapes and sizes, colours and textures, and part of the pleasure, as always with still-life painting, derives from dwelling on these differences. Ranged along a narrow shelf against his studio wall — which, with its scuffs of emulsion, exposed plaster and nail holes, almost qualifies as a found object in itself — we see a white enamel dish, a blackened lump of driftwood, a short length of weathered planking, once painted green, and half a cracked eggshell facing up, its albumen-glazed interior, dried to a shine, reflecting a pane of the studio window. The image, called simply 'Green', is of nothing much, yet the care with which it is painted gives us pause. Not just pause to gasp at its technical virtuosity but to think, hold on, what exactly is happening here? This fellow obviously thinks this stuff's important.
When a painter's technique is so good that it pushes realism over into trompe l'oeil, the illusion often becomes an end in itself. For most artists, being able to paint a transparent plastic bag full of stones so convincingly that it's recognisable at first glance would be achievement enough. But, for Rimmington, this is only the start. For the greatest still-life painters — the ones who animate the inanimate — the picture plane is not just an abstract space for shifting positive and negative shapes about, but a stage-set for a psychological drama in which the objects are actors and the artist is props man, lighting technician, director and playwright.
Rimmington is a still-life painter of this stamp, although the meaning of his dramas is far from clear. There's certainly no whiff of vanitas about them: symbolism on a plate is not his style. Just occasionally a topical reference will creep in, as in the recent painting 'Baghdad Brush', where the dome of an old, round, wooden brush-head discreetly casts a mosqueshaped shadow on the wall. But in general he fights shy of 'declamatory gestures', preferring the uncertainty of an image that 'isn't easily decipherable, that doesn't necessarily mean anything'. He's never happier than when poking around his nearby Ridley Road Market for oddities with exotic foreign names, the more unfathomable their functions the better. Two mysterious little hand-wrapped packets bought from a local West African shop in Stoke Newington have become the protagonists of a new picture. It's called Fante Kenkey' after the mystery contents of one of the packets, the name being as much of an incentive to paint it as the thing itself.
If Rimmington seems to take a perverse delight in indecipherability, it's not to make any sort of 'declamatory' point about the multicultural breakdown in communication that has become the subject of so much contemporary art. Rather, it's to celebrate his endless pleasure in the cultural richness of the flotsam and jetsam that the cross-currents of globalisation wash up on the shores of north-east London. The worth of his objects, if they have any, lies in their history, which he has made it his personal business to record. One new composition, 'Rescued from the Deep', includes a news photo of a bronze of a dancing satyr with a hole in its head fished from the sea five years ago off the coast of Sicily. The statue's vicissitudes were what interested him most: 'I like the idea of a thing made in Greece, then bought or stolen, put on a ship, hit by a cannonball, then found, then put in a museum, then painted by me.'
Art history has a similar appeal to him as a subject. Two new paintings include reproductions of works by his admired 18th-century Spanish predecessor Luis Egidio Melendez; another, with the title 'Spanish lifts Velazquez's glass of water with its mysterious fig straight out of The Waterseller of Seville', while slyly substituting a rhubarb-forcing pot for the waterseller's flagon. It's the levels of meaning caught in the layers of paint that give Rimmington's pictures their patina and depth. You can try to unwrap the meanings, or just enjoy the surface — which, fashioned by such a fine painter, is enjoyment enough.
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