Chromatology

David Batchelor’s first solo exhibition in Tehran comprised an overview of the Scottish artist’s and writer’s work, including sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and installation. While he is most known for his illuminated light boxes, industrial dollies and other found objects, the artist has made colour his leitmotif for the past twenty years. Batchelor takes interest in the synthetic kind of colour that occurs in the metropolis rather than the kind of natural and subdued tones found in nature. It is the stark, artificial, industrial and petrochemical qualities found in the built environment that inform his practice and manifest into various works.

Chromatology showcased Batchelor’s most recent work, a site specific work ‘Tehran Candella,’ that derived out of his trip to Tehran in 2016. The cluster of colourful ‘Aftabeh’, the pitchers left for hygienic use in lavatories, are included as ready objects, inverted and hung from the ceiling of the gallery. While the artist is not interested in the function of the object, the insertion of light is used as a ‘vehicle for colour,’ taking away from their objecthood and allowing the viewer to see the works purely as colour. Another featured work in the exhibition, Concretos, are a series of small concrete sculptures that have shards of glass inserted into them. These came directly out of his interest in the almost global convention where broken bottles are inserted into wet concrete to keep away from trespassers. The intimate size of these sculptures gives the broken glass a jewel like quality enhancing the vivid colour of the shards of glass.

Drawings and paintings lie at the core of Batchelor’s practice. As if extracted from his studio, a room of Atomic Drawings displayed at Ab-Anbar brought together over a hundred works on paper, with an array of mediums including highlighter, industrial tape, ink and spray paint. The Colour Chart Paintings also explored relationships between form and colour as well as the two dimensional versus the three dimensional.

The exhibition also included Batchelor’s photographs of Found Monochromes, 1997-2017, shown recently at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, which are a growing series of photographs of white rectangles found in the urban environment. Bachelor has explained his fascination as following, ‘A monochrome is always situated somewhere between the mystery of an infinite void and the ordinary materiality of a flat surface.’ Informed by a number of cities including London, Paris, Sao Paolo and Tehran, they are found voids and pauses in the never-ending feast of visual information.