JONATHAN WATERIDGE

The exhibition focuses predominantly on Wateridge’s paintings on paper, an intrinsic part of his practice. When working on larger canvases, Wateridge documents the changes throughout their creation and the slow attritional process of altering figures and backgrounds within the compositions. Many of the paintings on paper are based on these erased moments, on the ghosts of previous decisions that took place on the picture plane, and become a way of rematerialising lost states.

In these paintings, the staging from which the figures emerge seems quintessentially midcentury Los Angeles, yet suffused with a sense of the uncanny. Indeed, the often affluent surroundings serve not as places of respite but taut psychological dioramas where something ominous lurks out of view. In Fold and_House of Glass_, spectral figures are staggered across the depth of field, as if dispersing or diverted away from a gathering at the modernist glass edifice aglow in the background. The mode of dress in the paintings often suggests guests at a social event, but one disrupted, with the figures’ arms held or swinging in such a way to suggest sudden movement or an arrested moment. The composition is driven by narrative but one which the viewer cannot fully calculate, this resistance to ready interpretation adding to a sense of unease.

The treatment of the figures’ faces varies from the tonal suggestion of eye socket, nose and mouth to more finite features that, though complete, still seem to dissolve into themselves. For example, in Foreshock, a pained look is struck across the scarlet face, mouth slightly agape, brow furrowed, and eyes possibly closed. The suited figure lunges forth from a set of office blinds, which themselves are beginning to warp, as if the world around him is coming apart. The considered pout, red lip and raised eyebrows of the face in Within and Without are more discernible, allowing the viewer to perceive more clearly her appearance, yet not fully revealing her character.

The tangled limbs of Two Figures see their human forms enmeshed together, the indication of where one body ends and another begins only gestured towards with luminous outlines. The looping continuous line draws attention to the sculptural shape within, harshly lit by the simple shape of a lampshade in the top left. With these bodies in motion, abstracted and rendered in unnatural colour, a dream-like atmosphere is once again connoted, the warm tone also contributing to the emotional pitch of the composition.

The title of the show, No Longer, Not Yet, refers, on one hand, to the fact that, as previously noted, the works on paper are often either a study ‘after’ a lost painting or for a future larger work - they perpetually exist as possibilities. But it also relates to the moment in which many of the figures find themselves, at an inflexion point, but one beyond which we cannot see the outcome. The scenes depicted within the paintings can often be read as a moment before a significant occurrence, perhaps a change of fortune or the instance of its realisation. Throughout these paintings, the fluidity and indeterminate nature of Wateridge’s subjects instil within them a sense of existential disquiet. Any certainty that previously might have been available to them now seems lost.