Private view 15th February 2004
2-6pm

An introduction to the exhibition will be given at the private view by the art critic Nicholas Usherwood
at 3.30pm.


JOHN HOLDEN / PAUL MASON
by Nicholas Usherwood
December 2003

Don’t allow the lucid moment to dissolve/ Let the radiant thought last in stillness/ though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers…/ Don’t allow the lucid moments to dissolve/ On a hard dry surface you have to engrave the truth.
From ‘Tremor’ : Adam Zagajewski 1987

Two artists working in totally different media and, at
first sight at least, following quite different visual concerns, the ease and naturalness with which the abstract paintings of John Holden and stone sculptures
of Paul Mason refract off each other in the intimate and sympathetic architectural spaces of Fermynwoods makes
a quiet nonsense of such critical presumptions. So, look again, without them, and you find, on the one hand, a painter for whom abstraction has become the means by which to distil a continuing absorption with the sheer scale, the dynamics and diversity of the urban and
natural scene and, on the other, a carver of abstract geometries for whom the intimations of the landscape
and nature’s essential structures are always an essential grounding in the search for form. And, at a purely formal level too, we encounter a painter who is capable, often
on canvases not much more than 2ft square, of building architectures of a vital and monumental 3-dimensionality, and a carver who can draw and cross-hatch with his
chisel the linear contours and textures of the Gloucestershire landscape in which they were made on a block of stone whose form suggests the very depth of
the geology that lies beneath it. In each case their work represents moments of perceptual insight into the nature of visual experience given a tangible and objective being.

Nicholas Usherwood
December 2003

Gallery open
2-6pm Saturdays
2-6pm Sundays
or by appointment during exhibition dates.