Craig Burnett on James Lomax
To coincide with the creation of our limited edition Craig Burnett wrote an essay on James Lomax’s edition and his practice.
Chainlink fences have no centre or form, no structural unity from which to stand back and comprehend the specificity of any given example. Associated with schools, building sites, parks and banal urban areas, the chainlink weave inhabits the urban environment like the nervous system of our body politic. A fence extends time and space, pushing our body in a direction we probably don’t want to travel. Everywhere and nowhere, fragmentary, formless and forgettable – the chainlink fence is the very antithesis to a work of art. Yet for James Lomax its image has become, over the past six years, something of a touchstone.
Lomax’s print, counter relief I, looks like the surface of a black body bag that’s just been peeled off a fence, or the reflection of a cityscape in a pool of sump oil. The wobbly, uneven weave of the fence evokes a work of graffiti more than a mechanical process – and in fact the lines were etched directly into the surface of a 35mm negative by the artist, creating an almost sculptural form in the most stubbornly two-dimensional of mediums. A prismatic sparkle animates the lines of the fence, creating a persuasive illusion of three-dimensionality, an index of Lomax’s carving into the thin and delicate surface of the film. The marks convey a mix of delicacy and aggression, the image a delight in everyday nothingness. We might think of minimalism, Agnes Martin, or Richard Wentworth.
The print's lustrous black, scarred by the artist’s engraving, conjures a smothering sense of inescapability. The image invites us into a vacant nowhere, telling the viewer to get out, go away, turn back into the space you inhabit. And yet we return, look again: we trace the lines with our eyes, follow the sinuous forms across the black surface, try to find a way in or a way out. And just as you think the image is telling you to get lost, you feel it get under your skin.
Link to edition here - James Lomax, counter relief I
