Balsa Town - Ewen Coates

by Alice Eye

The work in Ewen Coates' current exhibition presents the viewer with a paradoxical play between a series of dichotomies - light/volume, surface/structure, and idea/form. Originally trained as a painter, Coates allows the work to resonate in the spaces between sculpture, painting and reality. Contrary to Tucker's (1) infamous dictum that sculpture should be . subject to gravity and revealed by light, Coates' Balsa Town converts the ephemeral and transitory form constructed from almost weightless material (the balsa of the title) through a triumphal immolation of light. Periscope-like vents rise above the surface, each 'cell' illuminated from within to allow a tentative contact with the outer world. It is light, rather than structure, which both reveals the form and conveys a poetic ambiguity within the form-are we in Bosnia or Broken Hill? Is this a citadel for the vanquished (as the accompanying mini-essay suggests), or is it a city of the future, where humans huddle underground and use technology to inoculate themselves against a toxic environment?

By contrast, Coates' three bronze 'swimmers' are denied their actual weight and density by being dynabolted to 'floating shelves' which protrude from the gallery wall. The viewer is forced to approach the series from the front, as one would approach a painting. As sculptural forms they resonate ambiguously between the luscious painterly surface of the bronze and the discrete use of patinas to colour the metal. The contrast between the two works could not be more stark. Where, in Balsa Town , Coates has created a subjective, interior space, the effect of his bronze swimmers' struggle against gravity reduces them to a series of weightless flying ducks.

There should be irony in this - because Coates is not as naïve as he pretends to be - but the swimmers' refuse to evoke any allegorical meaning beyond their repetitive form. Taken together, the two elements of Coates' work might represent an imaginary meeting between Anselm Kieffer and Sol Lewitt, perhaps it is the conversation across this conceptual divide which makes this show particularly interesting.

(1) William Tucker The Condition of Sculpture