Exhibition: 20 October - 8 November 2006
To offer an insight into the solo show of Luke Frost's recent work, the underquoted essay has been taken from the catalogue notes contributed by author and critic Peter Davies. Significantly, it traces the individuality of Frost's oeuvre, given his illustrious family name, and firmly places his work as a painter of integrity, sensitivity and comprehensive craft skill. It is well worth taking time to absorb the content. ''Luke Frost, who works from an artists' studio complex in central Penzance, uses what he describes as 'a meticulous process' in the production of assertive monochromatic canvases traversed by thin, lazer-like 'volts' or lines of pure, contrasting colour either centrally in the 'Supervolt' series or peripherally in the 'Chromavolt canvases. Within the limits of his chosen language Frost elicits marked variety in terms of colour, scale, format and linear placement, plastic qualities that carry differing spatial sensations, both in relation to the composition itself and beyond to the surrounding environment.
Intentionally or not, these elegant canvases possess a certain kinship to late modernist painting, notably to the post-painterly abstraction of Newman, Kelly or Noland or to the minimalism of Flavin, Judd or Ryman in America. This in turn distinguishes Frost from the pastoral romanticism and landscape content of post-war 'middle generation' abstraction in St. Ives. In its embrace of machine-like precision and pure unmodulated colour Frost's painting nevertheless contributes to a local hard-edge strain epitomised by late Feiler, Conn and others. Born in Penzance in 1976, Frost studied during the second half of the 1990s, first at Falmouth College of Art and then at Bath Academy. Since the millennium he has exhibited with increasing regularity, both locally and in the metropolis, a situation reminding us of Viv Lawes' observation in 'The Guardian' newspaper of an art 'absorbed by the changing light and its interaction with the countryside' on the one hand and one that is 'rigorously intellectual and urban' on the other. And within the palpable gestalt and concrete objecthood of these wall-bound canvases there lies a fathomless mystery and enveloping mood and atmosphere that speaks of an unfolding temporal as well as spatial experience.
However immediate their power of communication these works are indeed slow in the making, a dozen or more acrylic layers painstakingly built up with the perfectionist's attunement to surface facture, pitch, or colour saturation. At present, Frost is exploring various colours from greens and greys to blues and blacks. 'VOLTS NO. 6.0' and 'VOLTS NO. 6.1' (2006) use low-key colours, metaphors of the night, or of the infinitude of cosmic space perhaps, which contain suggestions of hidden colours no doubt embedded within successive layers of pigment. These canvases, like night, are spectacles of repose and contemplation. The oscillation within the 'Volts' series between singular or compounded linear elements is consistent with the way these works operate differently from near or far, or in natural morning or artificial evening light. Such concerns are classic in spirit, revealing an artist who deals in the uniquely visual sensation of light. A child also of a technological age, Frost - inspired by the minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin's electrical light tubes - has experimented with fluorescent light installations in collaboration with architects. Would a strip light collaged element perhaps replace a painted 'volt'? These explorations belong also to the tradition of Goethe and Chevreul, the colour theorists, and to the Divisionists' analysis of colour as products of broken light. Whichever way he now develops, Frost at thirty possesses a conceptual and technical assurance and maturity that bodes well for the future, not just of his own project but that of the ongoing tradition of modern painting in Cornwall.''
Peter Davies is a freelance art critic, obituarist for 'The Independent' and an author on St. Ives and modern British art. His book 'St. Ives Art 1975 - 2005' is published in 2007. |
Supervolt No.13.1 
Supervolt No. 21.2 
Volt No.5