20181005_164611

Artist: Mark Charlton

Title:Titan 130

Year: 2018

Dimension: 118 x 84 cm

Technique: Mixed Media Collage

Price: TBC

About the Artist

Mark Charlton was born in Margate in 1976. He studied at the North East Wales Institute of Art and Design, gaining a BA Hons in Animation Design in 2001.

After spending many productive years working as a freelance animator and motion designer primarily in the music industry, he has devoted his time to developing his own style in 2D mixed media work.

His recent bodies of work are an abstract combination of screen print, painting and collage, which allows the exploration of surface texture and graphical composition. He takes inspiration from Science Fiction Novella from the 1950’s and 1960’s in which he embraces colour and shape and amalgamates with a contemporary gritty urban feel.

His work is energetic and spontaneous, using multiple layers, which are built up over a substantial period of time, until a final composition is realised and refined. He finds a unique excitement in this layered approach which sees screen print forced to react with painted and collaged surfaces. Multiple techniques are used to decay and age the surface, which culminates in a final piece that has a striking first impression and a gentle beauty within its close up detail. Mark currently lives and works in Sussex.

Text taken from The affordable art fair website

What does this work say (to me)?

The use of the grid as a mean to express the intrinsic nature of cities is as old as the ancient Rome if not more.

It was the Romans who implemented this orderly pattern to define how their cities should be built and grow.

There have been many artists who have incorporated this formal element in their work either for imagining, describing, criticizing or destroying the cities they want, love or hate.

When I saw this painting by Charlton on which he is using different layers of grids that have been interrupted, modified or “crippled” I thought and felt of it as the representation of urban chaos, destruction and neglect.

As a romantic I was attracted by its beauty as well as I saw it as a ruin: the idealization of the “ruin” as a mean to convey nostalgia; present, past and future all of them expressing and living trough the portraying of that decay.

From the compositional point of view the relation between black and yellow and the white planes floating on the pictorial space took me to a more “academic” perception of the piece as it seems to refer to periods of the history of art where the grid was a tool, a mean and a goal like neoplasticism and constructivism.

Titan 130 is a intriguing and fascinating piece for me, it is a threshold for my imagination to run and my eyes to wonder.

In what Room to place it?

In any but if it were mine I would place in the room I would use the most.

Displaying it

I would place this work either on a pure white or a concrete background wall just to increase the drama on the collage, for making it rawer, for it to scream more.

I don’t think this piece needs a frame it would make it too pretty, too contained and tamed.