Opticks
Billy Fraser & Simone Mudde
29 June - 29 July 2023
Fraser and Mudde, like many before them, have a distinct interest in interrogating colour and form, combining tones in novel formations to affect new languages and reactions. The graduated and shifting colour patterns resulting from this processual experimentation are laid out across cast tablets and analogue photograms. While Fraser’s geometrical slabs seek to evoke notions of the sublime traditionally pursued in painting, to shift the specific beauty of one medium across to another, Mudde’s images consist of visualisations of the information embedded in the colours themselves, highlighting the ways in which perception is formed. It is this base relationship to process from which their wider practices unfurl.
Mudde’s work is often concerned with the concepts of time, labour, process and colour. Since beginning to print in colour darkrooms, the artist has been fascinated with the creation of an analogue colour space, spending hours in darkness to construct an object that shows both a full spectrum of colour, and the workings of the enlarger in the photographic workroom. She uses the inherent qualities and instruments of the medium, researching its boundaries by paring it down to its foundations, before rebuilding through configurations of these substructures. One central aim of this is to reflect on the ways in which the external is catalysed through our experience of it. Her methodologies, often respective – moulded to her own practices of making and thinking – reveal novel ways to consider the act of looking at colour and photography. Traces of the labour of these processes are visualised through the works themselves; flickers of movement in the cut-outs, amid gently moving gradients.
Fraser’s sculptural, expanded-painting practice seeks to evoke distinctive, epoch-defining moments in history that have stimulated a destabilising reaction in humans, from moon landings to assassination attempts. The foundation of these works is the totemic ability of certain objects to encapsulate awe, wonder and horror. The Colourscapes are the most elementary part of the artist’s experimentation, designed to function as harmonious colourways, leaning on theory to create emotional experience. Each tablet is treated as a block of data, communicating how different colours and intensities react with one another, as well as casting, in three dimensions, the artist’s reflections on the abstraction of painting as a medium. The cured pigments, used by Fraser as ongoing references, underline Josef Albers’ assertion that “Every perception of colour is an illusion... We do not see colours as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.”
Billy Fraser (b. 1995, Bath) lives and works in London, where he gained his BA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include Shattered at Grove, London (2023); and High Treason at Des Bains (2022). Recent group exhibitions include SPRING, The Coal Room, Vienna (2022); City Entwined, Paradise Row, London (2022); Wishbone, a duo exhibition with Mitch Vowles, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London (2021); Solstice Spectrum, The
New St Ives School, Cornwall (2021); Old Friends, New Friends, Collective Ending HQ, London (2021); Ancient Deities, Arusha Gallery, Glasgow (2020); and House §1, Collective Ending HQ, London (2020). Fraser is a founding member of Collective Ending, London.
Simone Mudde (b. 1989, Netherlands) lives and works in London. She received her MA in photography from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2018, and was part of an exchange with the School for Visual Arts, New York, in 2017. Her first solo exhibition, Hyper Nature, will open at Lismore Castle on 29 July 2023. Group exhibitions include: The Future Archive, Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA), London (2022); City Entwined, Paradise Row, London (2022); Midnight Sun, Black Tower Projects, London (2021); Where You Are Not, Copeland, London (2019); Belfast Photofestival, Belfast (2019); Unseen Amsterdam, Amsterdam (2018). In 2019, she was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, exhibiting her work at Leeds Art Gallery, and South London Gallery.
