- Venue
- ArtWorks
- Location
Chris Fraser KL99 – Recent Work at ArtWorks, Poole
I saw a Facebook comment from Chris Fraser, lamenting the lack of interest in his show and asking if the Bournemouth/Poole conurbation was the worst place in the UK to be a contemporary artist. This after almost no-one showed up to the private view. I have to admit to being one of the guilty. I go to most things at ArtWorks, but had to miss this one PV, as I was driving two young German friends to Heathrow that night. I hadn’t anticipated that my presence, had it been possible, would have boosted numbers by 10%.
I sent a message of support and went for a look a few days later. The work – a selection of small and medium-sized paintings and drawings – is not out of keeping with what is currently shown in London and other major UK cities and might be considered ‘contemporary’.
Fraser says he is interested in the artificial. Always black, white and linear, and applied with a mixture of coolness and faux naiveté, the images have overtones of David Shrigley, Richard Lindner, or maybe even Takashi Murakami, but without the colour. They hint at technical drawings of, perhaps, proposed stage sets or architectural details, but here or there a stuck-on teddy-bear eye or fur fabric tail breaks up what sense one might have found in the would-be scene. Plausibly drawn space is contradicted by the presence of a real physical object fixed to the surface, though this only happens up close – from a distance, the object looks like part of the drawing.
This work suggests and then leaves space for interpretation; gives enough to get the viewer started, but then leaves him/her to make up his/her own mind on where the conclusion lies. Do you believe in the drawing you see first, or in the contradiction – mockery, perhaps – you see as you get close? And how do you reconcile this? There is sense and some self-defined coherence, but it comes to us incomplete and without instructions.
You might see Fraser’s approach as enigmatic, deliberately abstruse or playful, but then, of course, you’d have see it to decide. Quite why there is a lack of interest in the contemporary visual arts in the area is hard to explain. Certainly, on one level at least, this is not a cultural backwater: the home of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is only a few hundred yards away from Fraser’s neglected show. Though maybe it is the presence of that mighty band that is the anomaly.
Personally, I think that elsewhere Fraser’s odd mix of sardonic humour and something not entirely different from surrealism would have been well received – or, at the very least, seen by someone.