Fogarty - LSix Undone

L'Six Undone

an art retrospective in six conversations

Gallery Ventintente, Shanghai, 2018

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Richard Fogarty

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2019 Richard Fogarty

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

The cover photograph ('Raft: 2' (1992)) is provided by kind permission of Crito Grayhard.

Photographic content copyright 2019 Richard Fogarty

Contents

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London, 1991

Shanghai, 2018

PRESS RELEASE

Gallery Ventintente, in the heart of Shanghai's Former French Concession, is pleased to present 'L' Six Undone', a showcasing of six, international, visual artists, from 4-29 November, 2018. The artists are each presenting a selection of twelve works, including three-dimensional and photographic items. This unique collaboration with the London gallery, roman.com, is the result of the curatorship of Chrycdriff T. Frig, a professional acquaintance of all the artists, three of whom are currently represented by roman.com, and four of whom are based in London. Part-retrospective, part-reunion, the show aims to reveal the commonalities which can exist between disciplines, and among a diverse range of artists with a shared environment experienced in their formative years. In this case, the curator has collated a collection of highly original work which is all underpinned by 'formal rigour and intellect, along with genuine mystery and individuality' (Gombrich), as an antidote to the largely inaccessible and identitarian work which currently pervades the globalised and conformist, commercialised art culture. This collection promises to remind us of the existence of contemporary art which, being primarily concerned with the more modernist sensibilities of aesthetics and truth, has become increasingly difficult to discover or promote at any level. The Gallery Ventintente, true to its reputation, thus promises a palliative in the form of a cerebrally-stimulating, visual treat, for the restoration of our faith in a shared, cultural future.

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The private view, of open invitation, will be at 7.30-10.00 pm, on 4 November, in the main showroom, on two upper floors; some of the artists will be present, and Chrycdriff T. Frig will address attendees with a short, keynote speech at 8.00 pm.

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Please note: the works are not for sale.

Richard Fogarty, September, 2018

INTRODUCTION

To explain something of this current show, or the gathering together of some of the works of these particular artists, is also to sketch something of the character of the show's curator, Chrycdriff (pronounced Chris-driff ) T. Frig. The seeds for this show were truly sown in London, at the culmination of the undergraduate studies of all these artists, as well as those of Frig, in the summer of 1992. Three of the artists (Friday, Troy and Corrar) graduated from the Painting school at Kingston, while the others completed studies in Central Saint Martin's (Grayhard), Goldsmith's (Ghador) and Chelsea (Garda), and Frig himself had pursued a Diploma at Byam Shaw, in Archway. The connection between them appears to be Frig himself, but although there was a loose connection between some of the artists, through their various Foundation Diploma courses in 1988, when they were spread across South London between Blackheath, Camberwell and Kingston, Frig attended the course in his home town, Brighton. Born here on 15 October, 1967, of Irish and English heritage, he had always aspired to joining the artistic zeitgeist in the metropolis, even as if Brighton had not always been a concentrated reflection of this, and so took it upon himself to regularly tour the art schools of London as soon as he joined Byam Shaw in the fall of 1989, unofficially attending lectures and discussing students' work with them in their studios. This stemmed from his fascination with the history of art and the creative process itself, having pursued modules in the History of Art, and the Philosophy of Art, at Brighton. He soon became such a feature in the colleges and at various private viewings in London that he came to be on first-name terms with many of the London college tutors of that time, although, despite the eclectic nature of his research, his own work remained, by his own admission, rather undeveloped. He chose to work solely in pencil, for example, producing rather non-referential works only in small sketchbooks (one of his longer-term drawing investigations at this time comprised a large number of drawings with tightly-paralleled concentric circles), many of which were lost by being left on the public transport vehicles across the metropolitan area. This resulted in his also being on first-name terms with some of the Lost Property staff, especially at London's Victoria Station.

Maintaining his art-historical interests, he took on short-term, assistant-curatorship roles, most notably at Chisenhale, Deptford, and Flowers East, then at the prestigious Hayward Gallery prior to, and during, the Doubletake exhibition in 1991-1992, finally landing a paid apprenticeship position at the ICA Gallery shortly before graduating. This valuable experience and his natural networking ability soon inspired him to go into partnership with an unnamed benefactor, to set up and run a studio-gallery property in Peckham, an enterprise to which he remains affiliated to this day. While he has used this to help launch the careers of a number of London-based artists (including the collective, Simpart # 134 (see Appendix Two)), he never renounced the plan he had made while touring the London degree shows of 1992, to secure significant exposure for some of the graduating students with whom he had become well-acquainted, especially those whose work he appreciated most. Staying in touch with them over the years, he finally saw the opportunity to realise this plan when he became a shareholder in the roman.com gallery on Roman Road, east London. roman.com had collaborated with a number of small galleries and artists in east Asia and Europe, and while on a networking trip to the Venice Art Biennale in 2015, Frig became acquainted with curators from the new galleries springing up in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, including the Gallery Ventintente. The rest is history, of course.

Frig is distinguished by his commitment to the integrity of the work of the artists he believes in, and his disposition and experience have given him an uncanny eye for the 'work that is good', as he puts it, without elaboration. It has been said, however, that he tends to favour the artists whose work does not have commercial value or potential, but he would claim that this is a false deduction which is merely an indictment of the state of the contemporary art world, which, having gone completely mainstream (populist) and culturally-Marxist, has lost all sense of orientation, using only its newly-acquired false values to steer by, and favouring only 'sensational' or so-called groundbreaking' work which, trusting to his keen sense of art history, Frig disparagingly refers to as 'product'. He has often cited the reference in the movie 'Dead Poets Society' (1989) to the fact that we stay alive for the arts, more than because of anything else, as a justification for his conservative outlook regarding art, and for keeping both mainstream politics and brutalism as far removed from it as possible.