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Contemporary art, Convent Garden, Exhibitions in London, Hidden gems, Jan Mol, Laurent Delaye Gallery, Light Installation, London art market, Mol's Place, Sculpture, Simon Tyzsko
Simon Tyszko works with a multitude of medias, and is very sensitive about space. It is why he choose, and was chosen, to present his new series, in the breathtaking and mind-boggling house in Covent Garden of Jan Mol, a Dutch collector living in London. And Tyzsko was up to the challenge.
The house consists of a towering red brick hall equivalent to 6 floors in height, and forming a gigantic atrium where at its centre a house is erected, itself a pure white minimal square volume running to the top and offering on its flanks a mesmerising exhibition space. On one side of this unique atrium space is a gigantic window 20 meters high, providing light to the entire living space, although the house-within-a-house possesses very few windows strategically posited to receive daylight.
Before exploring Simon Tyzsko’s new exhibition, it is worth looking at the space where the artist himself lives. In a small council flat in Fulham, Simon built five years ago a permanent installation called Phlight, a full size replica of a Dakota airplane wing that literally cuts through the entire two rooms of his living space.
The flat is too small for the wing to not interfere with the actual accomodation, and one has to crawl from one place to the other. It’s ideal for cats, kids, and geologists with rampant symptom of cave withdrawals. In it, Simon receives cross legged sitters attending lectures, eating his artful cooking and debating whilst sipping green tea. No cannabis or white powder is to be found, as despite the chilling out rugs and pillows floor environment , the artist has renounced drugs years ago.
In Modern Neon Lights at Mol’s Place the artist has created a series of neon works, combined with photo-montage, a projection running through the transparency of the glass staircase leading to the space, sculptures, both ephemeral and objects based, creating a multi-media, multi-dimensional environment.
As Peter Suchin writes, “The beautiful brightness of the illuminated tubes has its melancholy side however; something about the sadness of the loss of Tyszko’s photographer brother when the artist was just ten years old, seems to hover about them. The trace of this loss is inherent within many of Tyszko’s works, in the neons but in many other pieces too. Absence, disappearance, or the impossibility of adequately pinning down the passing of time runs like a leitmotiv through Tyszko’s work. Highly detailed photographs of long-playing records in which every groove, together with the scratches across the record’s surface and the dust caught in the tracks, engage the viewer in a paradoxical encounter wherein the sonic is rendered mute, and the particularity of a given experience of listening is translated into a visual image. We are not told which records Tyszko has photographed but the sense that these individual objects hold (or held) deeply personal meanings for a specific listener is very strong. The scratches and dust only serve to heighten the intimacy of an individual’s encounter with a work of art. Tyszko’s practice operates at this finely and rightly tuned level of engagement: the subjective and the idiosyncratic becoming the foil, the ground and the condition of a highly meaningful exchange between public and private frames of reference.
Most recently, Tyszko has produced a series of works in which pictures borrowed from his own family’s photograph album have been grouped together in hitherto unexplored arrangements, moving the images from their initial domestic context and placing them in the public domain. Tyszko has added blocks of transparent colour to these retrieved images, giving another dimension to their force of signification. Another new work, one which will decay over the duration of the exhibition, is a memorial wreath bearing a long text relating the deep personal loss involved when someone one loves dies or disappears. Normally the bearer of nothing more than the deceased’s name or familial identity (“Mum” or “Nan”), on this occasion a more convoluted text has been used, one demanding an active reaction from the viewer.”
Modern Neon Lights run until 6 May and is punctuated by a series of events. read more here
