Michael Lawton Enodia. Michael Lawton

Michael Lawton uses abstraction to depict prosaic things like a wall or a desk, or to narrate verbal moments, vivid or speculative; the precise instant when a phosphorescent ash cloud solidified around the city of Pompeii, for example, or the moment our ancestors emerged from the primordial swamp 3.8 billion years ago.

In this exhibition by the British artist based in Barcelona at the Ana Mas Projects gallery, he will present a new series of paintings created especially for the occasion, in which the artist explores a particular reflection inspired by the goddess Enodia, protector of the roads.

Thus, forming the central core of the exhibition, the idea of ​​duplicated paintings that we could see at his last exhibition at La Capella (Barcelona), is deployed in a new approach through a series of eight half-formed paintings that offer a view of a place in a road, as if it were a sequence of frames, inviting us to perceive subtle differences in the darkness, similarly as when we observe the small marks and sparkles in the black leader that precedes any 16 mm film projection. Lawton’s characteristic palette of bright and fresh colours gives way on this occasion to works in which colour loses prominence, in favor of a darker, almost monochrome palette. Alongside this group, the exhibition also incorporates a series of vibrant new acrylic paintings. Writing, so characteristic of Lawton’s practice, will also be present.

Michael Lawton. Born in Sheffield, UK, in 1980 Lawton moved to Barcelona in 2017. He has since completed residencies at Hangar, MACBA Study Centre (CED) and began a long-term residency at La Escocesa that is still ongoing. He staged a solo exhibition, I Remember You from a Future Life, at La Capella (2023-2024), La pedra ritual de Collserola at Centre d’Art Maristany (2023) and Cangles, at Fundació Arranz Bravo (2022). He also has participated in the group exhibitions: Seeing, Feeling, Forgetting, APT Gallery (London); Al alcance, Dilalica gallery (Barcelona); Aliento, Nogueras Blanchard gallery (Barcelona).

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In the Dark. Frederic Montornés

It was not the first time he had seen his work, but that day he had to retrace his steps to ascertain whether what he had just seen was something he had seen before or if he had merely dreamt it. He says that on his return everything he came across appeared to him again, but seen from a different perspective. Perhaps he had seen it before, but now, unlike the first time, he was seeing it clockwise, that is to say, from left to right,

I don’t know about you, but he says that unless he is forced to do otherwise, he usually views exhibitions starting from the right. Always. He cannot deny that, although in other spheres of activity he always prefers the left and the odd one out – perhaps because of the strange nature of the behaviour of a right-hander – he finds it easier to begin visiting an exhibition from the right. It feels more natural to him.

He says that viewing an exhibition clockwise makes him feel as if time is running out. It is as if you were being hurried along, he claims, because otherwise it will soon become dark and it will be difficult for you to continue doing what occupying you, for example, viewing an exhibition.

There are few exhibitions that can be seen at night. Or, to be more precise, exhibitions designed to be viewed at night. In any case, he has never seen any. He has, however, seen exhibitions by the light of a few lamps, particularly on winter evenings after six o’clock, when it is getting dark and night is setting in. No, when he speaks of seeing exhibitions at night, he does not mean by artificial light, but actually in the dark, that is to say, without light, when it appears impossible to see anything. But we all know that this is not the case. Because you can see things at night, too. Just ask Arnold Böcklin (Basel, 1827 – Fiesole, 1901), the painter of twilight landscapes, the artist of the island of the dead, the soul of elegiac cypresses!

But let’s go back. What happens when you see an exhibition anti-clockwise? Well, the forms that the spectator comes across – which enable you to interpret what you see –  appear in a different way. That is, they appear in the sense in which you read, write or observe a landscape, that is to say, from left to right. The way we are taught to do it.

Charon’s boat sails from left to right carrying a dying soul to a cypress-lined cemetery, similar to those that one sees in Venice. Was Böcklin attempting to say something when he made his boat head towards the place of the dead in the same direction as his writing?  Did Böcklin know that Charon was accompanied by Enodia with her songs on the way to the place of burial? Was Böcklin aware of the relation of this goddess to the world of the dead, or that she watched over entrances and roads in cities and outside houses, shrines and cemeteries? Did Böcklin know that Enodia would welcome Charon?

From left to right, at night and in the dark, but also painting and paint, writing and text, and suggesting with words and images arising from the same geographical space. Anyone would say they are the same thing, but they are not, at all. It is what the journey is that M told him about when he went to his studio to see the works that form this exhibition. The works that you now see before you. Over the course of that meeting, which took place on May 28 and where, when he arrived, B was already there with M, they were waiting for him. And the three began to talk about what they saw before them, which was:

– nearly a dozen paintings, in various formats and colours, repeating a series of elements which, if you looked at them carefully, you could see were not identical, because there were differences between them. This was what, in a way, he suspected he would see once more;

– and a series of new works comprising eight paintings which, although M had not conceived them as such, that is to say, a series, seemed to him to be so because they all had the same format, they all had the same title (except for the number after the title), they had all been made with the same technique, a similar image appeared in all of them and, as a whole, they shared a colour which, although at first sight it might seem black, was in fact dark with bluish, brownish, greenish tones… small, almost imperceptible differences, among a group of images with cinematographic undertones. He thought. Like stills from a night excursion. That is, taken at night, in the dark. Without light.

He says that at the end of that visit he said goodbye to M and B and that, on the way back, he could not erase from his mind the memory of those images which all, absolutely all, ended in the same place: the place inhabited by some cypress trees, at night. He says that he also remembered the coloured images and that the direction he took on the journey back was, of course, from left to right. When he arrived at his destination, he wrote until he had finished the work in hand, always following that same direction.

Then he said that he had not written anything at all. And that everything was in what he had seen.

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The cypresses maintained. Michael Lawton

The cypresses maintained, and because not everything did, because things were definitely different from the world of his parents; from the one he had imagined being an adult in, he found himself more than once thinking it was surprising that so many trees had survived what happened, and how happy that made him.

The cypresses lined the long steep walk to the cemetery. The length and incline meant he would look for ways to distract his son so he wouldn’t have to pick him up and end up carrying him, as he so often did. It had been the same with his daughter when she was younger, accompanying him on this same journey, to visit the grave of his father-in-law.

Seeing a wagtail flit between the macchia shrubland he turned toward the boy so he might point it out to him. He watched his son, 10 metres behind him, walking a cowboy’s wide legged walk, studying whatever detritus was collected beneath him, hoping to spot some treasure. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t want to hurry him or make him aware of their climb, they were in no rush after all, instead he looked past his son, back down toward the city, the lick of the orbital road that the bus taken, leading his eyes back to the city and beyond that to the hills on the other side of it.

Turning forward he looked at the sky, vaster and clearer in the hills where the cemeteries were, he craned his neck further and further back. The sky was a beautiful milky blue, the moon floating in front, ghostly but omniscient. He closed his eyes, he heard the hiss of another bus stopping, the soft hum of insects behind the rough burr of traffic.

He thought about what he knew about the man whose grave they were going to visit. A grave he had visited numerous times but a man he had never met, who like so many had lost his life in what was simply referred to as “the change”.

He knew that this man would flatten his sandwiches with the side of his knife before eating them, simply claiming that they tasted better that way. But more than anything else, he knew that he used to collect tin boxes. His wife had actually told him about it one of the first times they’d met; “What do you do with someone’s stuff after they’ve died? Things they’ve collected” She’d asked him, “something that meant so much to one person but little as objects to others, other than that they seemed to contain something of the departed within them.”

He thought that perhaps they had functioned in the same way to his father-in-law. Perhaps that was what he saw in them, a connection to previous generations, a thread we could pull on to lead us back into the past, the man had also had a handful of black and white photographs that his wife had told him he would shuffle through every now and then, some of distant relatives, some just of the world in black, white and greys, “I want to remember that we used to see things like this,” he would say when questioned on his habit.

He didn’t know where these photographs were but he knew all about the tins. His wife and mother in law had decided to leave a tin at the graveside every month, knowing full well these tins would disappear.

Apparently there had been 120 tins, which meant leaving a tin a month for ten years. The two women were halfway through this process when his wife asked him if he could start dropping some off.

It was in the large and scruffy rucksack that he was carrying off one shoulder. As well as the tin his wife had asked he leave on the grave, it contained all the things he thought he might have needed for the journey , many because of the age of his son, plus some candles also for the graveside.

The bag looked a little incongruous against his clothes; a dark blue suit, a white shirt open at the neck. He was warm, not uncomfortably so, but he could feel the sweat under the rucksack.

“I’m doing it for my mum eh? Not for me,” she told him. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but it didn’t matter, he was doing it for himself, as well as them, he thought, as a way of making sense of “the change”, perhaps.

And now he often ended up doing it, his shift on reception in a hospital ended early enough that he was able to pick his son up from nursery, as he had done previously with his daughter, and accompanied by a child he’d go to the cemetery, leave a tin and light a candle. His daughter would be in swimming class now he thought absentmindedly, and he went with the boy instead.

He knew that the tin he had left last time would have gone. wondering if it was the same person who took them. He’d never seen the scrap metal collectors that he saw in the rest of city up here, and he didn’t know if decorum would prevent them from taking metal from a graveside.

His daughter had suggested it was the goddess Enodia who took them.

“I met her there once,” she had said, her six year old face smiling, but not in a way that allowed him to discern if she was joking.

“She spoke to me, she said:

You’ll find me in the road, above your doorways. In that space between one moment and the next.”

–

Today’s offering was an old tobacco tin, a souvenir of some city probably but scratched so much, it was as if smog had crowded the city, leaving only spires visible and the city unidentifiable.

He realised that the things that his father-in-law had considered part of his world were the same throughout his life, just because the wider world had moved on, his taste hadn’t, and why should it. Perhaps no one’s does after a point. Your reference points are your reference points, your coordinates. How you situate what you see. Your own world is the one you live in after all.

His head began to feel heavy in this position and he opened his eyes and looked at his son, smiled as he realised that the boy was mimicking his posture, looking up at whatever was beyond the sky. He waited for the boy to ask “Is Granddad up there?” but he didn’t, instead he turned towards him with his arms out, in a “pick me up” gesture.

With a smile he walked back to where his son was, scooping him up with elbows bent so as to prevent the rucksack sliding down his arms. Father and son continued on their way to the cemetery, one carrying the other.

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