Sorcha Dallas

Michael Benevento is pleased to announce the Los Angeles solo debut of Glasgow based artist Charlie Hammond.

Aptly titled Doerupper, Charlie Hammond’s artwork foregrounds the potential of an object and the prospect of material, with a little reconstruction and maintenance. Hammond’s work engages a variety of materials, humorously provoking a vocabulary of art historical references, aesthetics of high art, and processes. Ceramics and paint, abstraction and figuration combine to produce diversity in discourse and a multiplicity of art objects. Hammond’s work often unites paradoxical areas of elegant formalism and urbane naivety, permitting a sort of modern primitivism and an inquiry of the artist’s authorial role. For Hammonds, working between disciplines is defiantly flexible; it provides satisfaction, transparency, and puts into question expectations about taste and technique.

In his Doerupper series, it appears as if stones have been thrown at the paintings, forcefully embedding themselves into the murky oil surfaces. This kind of action brings to mind radical process-oriented painting methods of the 60s and 70s. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that Hammond has in fact arranged glazed ceramic objects, resembling small and pointed fragile stones, which have been gently placed on top of the dark oil compositions, creating the effect of a celestial or landscaped surface. This confusing statement in fact permits a certain transparency into Hammond’s process. The series title, Doerupper, playfully conjures a dilapidated house, something unfinished and in need of repair, however filled with possibility. The consequential use of ceramic, both a malleable and brittle element, within the context of a painting furthers the opportunity for regeneration.

The series of plaster and ceramic sculptures, Sculpture with Missing Wheel, is made up of three discrete works. Plaster bandaged forms and ceramic bricks engage a kind of rudimentary formalism. The crude and abrasive surfaces of the plaster are rendered immobile and dependent on the stack of pale yellow and red rectangular bricks, which assist in the propping of each work. Balanced, totem-like, on Sculpture with Missing Wheel, 3 is a misshapen ceramic bottle, which makes one wonder where these pieces would go if their wheel was returned.

This transparency of formal support imposed within Hammond’s artwork carries over within a series of paintings in which the actual support of the canvas is exposed and incorporated into the painterly composition. Gray and white two lane roads crisscross each of these paintings like topographical latticework. In the places where Hammond has not removed sections of the canvas, a narrative is suggested. In the painting Hungry Man with Intersecting Roads there is a carefully rendered figure, food in hand, painted onto the center of the canvas where he is abruptly bisected by a diagonal road winding across the canvas. The process of under painting is taken to an extreme as the uncovered wood of the stretchers and the wall itself, each contribute to the painting.

SUPPORTED BY THE SCOTTISH ARTS COUNCIL

Michael Benevento Gallery is located at 7578 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5pm. For information please contact the gallery at 323.874.6400 or info@beneventolosangeles.com