In Johnnie Dady's latest body of work, there is a wonderful sense of someone who, after operating at what are ostensibly the edges of drawing, returns to the elemental business of decisions, erasures and marks on a surface. It is a joyful return, and one fraught with struggle; fun was had, but there was much gnashing of teeth.

The exquisitely described architectural spaces appearing in the work do not seem too far removed from Dady's recent scaffolding works, Construction Drawings. At a glance we might feel that Dady was hovering around fairly safe terrain. But, like any self-critical artist, Dady continues to deliberately contrive obstacles for himself, then proceed to circumvent them, and out of this process have come some damn fine drawings. Among the artist's chosen obstacles are some of the big ones: the human figure, sex, memory and imagination.

In The Barcelona Room... Dady uses memory as a filter. All the drawings in the show were drawn solely from memory and imagination, and consequently the drawings are densely packed with incidents of remembering, half-remembering, not remembering and inventing (there was a chair there... was there a chair there?). Inside these spaces conjured and held together by recollection, scenes of human activity, frequently sexual in nature, unfold. These scenes are knowingly placed as a potential stumbling block for both the viewer and the artist. On one hand, these aspects of the drawing make arriving at the Thing Of It much harder work for the viewer. The scent of sex permeates much of the work, and can easily overrun and consume our sense of these drawings. After all, when paired with images of sexual intimacy, the interior spaces, with all their voids, corridors, beams and pillars, become metaphorically charged. But as loaded and fraught with potential problems as it is, the erotic component of these drawings seems to be a crucial foil. The artist uses it to pose himself the question, can the drawing be tough enough to match the loaded subject matter? For the most part, the rigour and wonderful dexterity Dady brings to the work, matches the potency of his figures, and a subtle tension is maintained.

While these deliberately placed impediments condition the work, in other areas the artist has allowed himself certain freedoms. The minimalist urge that has informed much of Dady's previous work gives way to a mode of working where the artist allows himself to freely compose with whatever comes to mind, as long as it benefits the drawing. A figure in Dady's drawings may very well grow wings, be accosted by a duck or find Carravagio's Bacchus climbing his or her balcony, if it serves the greater good of the composition. The works are titled geographically - London Room, Paris Room, etc. - and numbered. This numbering indicates that several drawings from the larger body of work have been culled for this showing; for example, of the nineteen (or more) Barcelona Rooms, only ten are present in the gallery. Dady takes editing very seriously, and while this selection makes the show a tougher, more muscular beast, I think perhaps the exhibition would have benefited from a few more omissions. For instance, the works displayed in the gallery's mezzanine: a number of composition studies and some smaller and swifter recollections of rooms, as well as two suites of work made in collaboration with Chelsea Lehmann which suggest a different intent from the rest of the show. These collaborative works are characterised by a sort of filmic quality, and while large drawings downstairs crackle with the energy of their own making, these works seem muted, sometimes to the point of murkiness.

For me, the spirit of the exhibition is best summed up in London Room #1. In this drawing, a figure stands atop a stacked chair and stool and measures the space with its inhumanly long, Inspector Gadget-like arms. This impossible gesture seems curiously akin to an act of drawing, and speaks of a yearning, present in all of Dady's work, to reach further, see more and know more.




[back to top]