Paul Caffell

Paul Caffell's abstract paintings belong to the modernist tradition: they explore the process of mark making, the very language of painting, at the same time as they invoke a sense of intense concentration and stillness. Paul Caffell's work has been inspired by avant-garde music since he began painting in the early 1960s, and belongs to the long search within modernism for an equivalent rhetoric of abstraction for painting. The paintings are at once profoundly gestural and understated, with the marks within an almost monochromic field often being the product of chance, but nonetheless often being delicate, sensitive and demanding careful work by the spectator to distinguish them. Caffell's work, then, is as much about time as it is about the mark: both the time of the painter, the meditated process of production, and the time of the spectator who, in their attention, is displaced from the everyday impacts of modernity on consciousness into their own wrapt, internal, world of experience with the artwork. Looking at a Paul Caffell painting is much like listening to a chamber work by Kurtág, Henze or Nono, both painter and composer demand intense attention and reward it with a radically different form of consciousness.

Chris Townsend

Paul Caffell

Paul Caffell is a British painter, an abstractionist who first exhibited in the 1960s when he was a protege of Roland Penrose, that great supporter of Modernism in Britain after the Second World War. Caffell's last solo shows were in London and Switzerland in the late 1960s, after which he painted privately and concentrated on other creative projects ' notably reinventing platinum printing for photographs, a technique that had died out in the 1920s. His painting has an intimate relationship with music, and here I must declare an interest since I curated the show 'To Become Like Music' in 2008, which was the first public outing for Caffell's painting in 40 years. The painting, like the music that inspires it, is neither immediate in its effects, nor facile. We do not turn to Stockhausen, Roberto Gerhard or Luigi Nono for easy tunes. Caffell's painting makes demands upon its audience that are now unusual, if not altogether forgotten. This is painting that demands time, thought and an interiorised response that, like late-modernist music, eschews narrative in favour of rhetorical experiment. Like late-modernist music, however, this is painting that is made to last, not to be disposed of with the arrival of the next pop sensation. 

The demands and the darkness (in more than one sense) of Caffell's work actually increase with his more recent paintings. On reflection, one of the great benefits of the Mummery & Schnelle show was that it demonstrated the progression of Caffell's painting from the 1960s to the present. The early canvases, with their broader palette and wider range of forms, are almost jaunty at times. Certainly there is about them a lightness as well as a tension between the organic and the mechanical that is perhaps a generic characteristic of British post-war abstraction in modernity's last utopian moment. Already certain of Caffell's techniques are established in these early paintings: the characteristic ridged and furrowed spectra that arc across the field, the calculated variation in the consistency of paint. The more recent paintings are much darker ' often at first sight they are black monochromes that only slowly surrender their subtleties of colour and texture. At times in these works Caffell's fields have an almost metallic sheen to them. In this they have something in common with the work of Ad Reinhardt, one of the inspirations for the young Caffell, but if I could identify two painters as cross-references for Caffell's mature work they would be Philip Guston ' in his Ab Ex phase ' and Therese Oulton. Guston, of course, was one of those American painters who had close relationships with, and was inspired by, late-modernist composers, most notably Morton Feldman, but also the decidedly thornier Stepan Wolpe and Earle Brown. Most people now prefer Guston's bathetic, figurative, narrative paintings of the 1970s to the abstracts, but after three decades of figurative painting that has mistaken bathos for pathos perhaps it is time to rethink what really matters in that oeuvre. Like Oulton's and Guston's abstracts, Caffell's late paintings are characterised by 'slow release'. You realise progressively that these monochromes are far more complex than a quick glance will allow. Citric greens and fiery oranges escape from fissures within the darkness until they come, with time, to dominate the gaze. What looks to be a monochrome, brooding, dark and encoded with meaning only through texture is torn open to reveal a sensate, existential, impassioned interior. Yet those tears are effected with economy: there is no overflow of sensation ' we see just enough. They are accompanied now by a new technique, a kind of writing, the paint scraped through with the fingernail in jagged lines that graph not rational communication but the communing between painter and his medium. 

Paul Caffell Artist

Paul Caffell's abstract paintings belong to the modernist tradition: they explore the process of mark making, the very language of painting, at the same time as they invoke a sense of intense concentration and stillness. Paul Caffell's work has been inspired by avant-garde music since he began painting in the early 1960s, and belongs to the long search within modernism for an equivalent rhetoric of abstraction for painting. The paintings are at once profoundly gestural and understated, with the marks within an almost monochromic field often being the product of chance, but nonetheless often being delicate, sensitive and demanding careful work by the spectator to distinguish them. Caffell's work, then, is as much about time as it is about the mark: both the time of the painter, the meditated process of production, and the time of the spectator who, in their attention, is displaced from the everyday impacts of modernity on consciousness into their own wrapt, internal, world of experience with the artwork. Looking at a Paul Caffell painting is much like listening to a chamber work by Kurtág, Henze or Nono, both painter and composer demand intense attention and reward it with a radically different form of consciousness.
Chris Townsend

Paul Caffell photographer

When Paul Caffell established 31 Studio in 1988 it was the first dedicated platinum print workshop to be set up in England. Caffell recovered a photographic process that had been hugely important at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, but which had gone into decline and seemingly been forgotten by the 1920's.
31 Studio has become the foremost specialist in hand-crafted Platinum - Palladium prints, earning a worldwide reputation. The studio performs an important role for the history of photography, restoring to our attention some of it's greatest images, and working with the greatest skill and delicasy on precious and sometimes damaged negatives.

Professor Christopher Townsend 2010

Paul Caffell

When Paul Caffell photographer established 31 Studio in 1988 it was the first dedicated platinum print workshop to be set up in England. Caffell recovered a photographic process that had been hugely important at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, but which had gone into decline and seemingly been forgotten by the 1920's.

31 Studio has become the foremost specialist in hand-crafted Platinum - Palladium prints, earning a worldwide reputation. The studio performs an important role for the history of photography, restoring to our attention some of it's greatest images, and working with the greatest skill and delicacy on precious and sometimes damaged negatives. (Professor Christopher Townsend 2010)

Paul Caffell Photographer

Mummery & Schnelle London 

Paul Caffell is a British painter, an abstractionist who first exhibited in the 1960s when he was a protege of Roland Penrose, that great supporter of Modernism in Britain after the Second World War. Caffell's last solo shows were in London and Switzerland in the late 1960s, after which he painted privately and concentrated on other creative projects ' notably reinventing platinum printing for photographs, a technique that had died out in the 1920s. His painting has an intimate relationship with music, and here I must declare an interest since I curated the show 'To Become Like Music' in 2008, which was the first public outing for Caffell's painting in 40 years. The painting, like the music that inspires it, is neither immediate in its effects, nor facile. We do not turn to Stockhausen, Roberto Gerhard or Luigi Nono for easy tunes. Caffell's painting makes demands upon its audience that are now unusual, if not altogether forgotten. This is painting that demands time, thought and an interiorised response that, like late-modernist music, eschews narrative in favour of rhetorical experiment. Like late-modernist music, however, this is painting that is made to last, not to be disposed of with the arrival of the next pop sensation. 

The demands and the darkness (in more than one sense) of Caffell's work actually increase with his more recent paintings. On reflection, one of the great benefits of the Mummery & Schnelle show was that it demonstrated the progression of Caffell's painting from the 1960s to the present. The early canvases, with their broader palette and wider range of forms, are almost jaunty at times. Certainly there is about them a lightness as well as a tension between the organic and the mechanical that is perhaps a generic characteristic of British post-war abstraction in modernity's last utopian moment. Already certain of Caffell's techniques are established in these early paintings: the characteristic ridged and furrowed spectra that arc across the field, the calculated variation in the consistency of paint. The more recent paintings are much darker ' often at first sight they are black monochromes that only slowly surrender their subtleties of colour and texture. At times in these works Caffell's fields have an almost metallic sheen to them. In this they have something in common with the work of Ad Reinhardt, one of the inspirations for the young Caffell, but if I could identify two painters as cross-references for Caffell's mature work they would be Philip Guston ' in his Ab Ex phase ' and Therese Oulton. Guston, of course, was one of those American painters who had close relationships with, and was inspired by, late-modernist composers, most notably Morton Feldman, but also the decidedly thornier Stepan Wolpe and Earle Brown. Most people now prefer Guston's bathetic, figurative, narrative paintings of the 1970s to the abstracts, but after three decades of figurative painting that has mistaken bathos for pathos perhaps it is time to rethink what really matters in that oeuvre. Like Oulton's and Guston's abstracts, Caffell's late paintings are characterised by 'slow release'. You realise progressively that these monochromes are far more complex than a quick glance will allow. Citric greens and fiery oranges escape from fissures within the darkness until they come, with time, to dominate the gaze. What looks to be a monochrome, brooding, dark and encoded with meaning only through texture is torn open to reveal a sensate, existential, impassioned interior. Yet those tears are effected with economy: there is no overflow of sensation ' we see just enough. They are accompanied now by a new technique, a kind of writing, the paint scraped through with the fingernail in jagged lines that graph not rational communication but the communing between painter and his medium. 

Paul Caffell Photographer

When Paul Caffell photographer established 31 Studio in 1988 it was the first dedicated platinum print workshop to be set up in England. Caffell recovered a photographic process that had been hugely important at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, but which had gone into decline and seemingly been forgotten by the 1920's.

31 Studio has become the foremost specialist in hand-crafted Platinum - Palladium prints, earning a worldwide reputation. The studio performs an important role for the history of photography, restoring to our attention some of it's greatest images, and working with the greatest skill and delicacy on precious and sometimes damaged negatives. (Professor Christopher Townsend 2010)

Paul Caffell

Group Show Point – Horizon – Structure: Jyll Bradley, Paul Caffell, and Terry Smith.

Group Show

Point – Horizon – Structure: Jyll Bradley, Paul Caffell, and Terry Smith.

15.03.12 - 28.04.12

Mummery + Schnelle / London / England

Mummery + Schnelle is pleased to present a show with recent works by Jyll Bradley, Paul Caffell, and Terry Smith.

The title of the exhibition, Point-Horizon-Structure comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s study of perception, defining it as a process of experience and conscious action. The three artists featured in this show share a similar concern for the mechanisms of perception, questioning and constantly redefining its essence through experimental studio practices. The works included in this show share a common ground, a fundamental set of elements with which to experience and understand the phenomenology of perception, namely light and shadow, and correspondently, matter and void. These elements represent the binary opposition at the heart of an experience of the world, which is predominantly visual and photographic. Through their studio practice, these artists question the intersections of photography, drawing and installation, blurring the line between the bi-dimensional and the sculptural.

Jyll Bradley presents a selection of works from three of her most recent series: ‘Their flight is knowledge, space is their alienation’, ‘Look at me now and here I am’ and ‘Airports for the Lights, Shadows and Particles’. Light is a protagonist in Bradley’s work, drawing together images, words and form to create inquiring spaces and unusual meetings. Her “light drawings” meditate on studio practice and form a personal art history relating to photography and its history. Her light boxes and aluminium panels draw on industrial, Minimalist forms and use them to insist on content vis a vis sexual politics and identity. For Bradley a light box is a beacon, a navigation point and a sales pitch. Using them, as she does in two of the works in this exhibition, to depict women priests performing acts of obeisance in ornate church interiors raises questions about power, identity and the nature of religious faith.

Jyll Bradley (b.Folkestone 1966) was educated at Goldsmith’s College (1985–88) and the Slade (1991–3). Since the early 1990s she has exhibited her work in numerous notable exhibitions both in the UK and internationally including The British Art Show, Hayward Gallery, London and tour (1990), Maureen Paley Interim Art (1989), the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2008) and the inaugural show at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London (2009). Bradley has also undertaken major commissions for the re-opening of Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2005), and solo British Council funded projects with Museo De Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China (both 2004). In 2008 her Residency within Liverpool Botanical Collection formed one of the significant commissions for the city’s year as European Capital of Culture. Bradley’s work was recently the subject of a major survey show Airports for the Lights, Shadows and Particles first shown at The Exchange (Newlyn Art Gallery) in 2010 and touring to the Bluecoat, Liverpool 2011. She is currently working on a major project for Canberra’s Centenary programme in 2013.

To fold is an action that allows Paul Caffell to manipulate light and shadow. His practice entails both a construction, by means of scoring and folding, and a deconstruction, from unfolding and flattening. The works from his two series ‘Expansions’ and ‘Envelopes’ experiment with the perception of structure and volume, employing a very rigorous monochromatic scale and an essential photographic process – the platinum print.

Paul Caffell has been making art since the early 1960s, when as an emerging young artist he was mentored by the leading British modernist critic, collector and painter, Roland Penrose. After exhibiting internationally during the decade, with work being purchased by several important collections, he withdrew to paint privately and developed his photographic practice. Mummery + Schnelle first showed Caffell’s work in the group show ‘To Become Like Music’ in 2008, emphasising the influences and affinities of the paintings in the relationship between music and modernist painting and performance in the post-war avant-garde. He had his first solo exhibition at the gallery at the end of 2011. A book documenting his paintings and platinum prints from 1961 to 2011 is available from the gallery.

Terry Smith’s practice has often involved direct action with the space around him and the objects that fill it, open and close it, contain or expand it. Smith’s work is a constant inquiry into the perception of space and the poetry of the everyday. His practice involves multiple processes and actions, from a physical intervention of space by means of construction and demolition, through to a sculptural notion of drawing where the surface of the paper becomes three-dimensional through relief and indentation, but whose method involves as least as much erasure as addition. Smith’s work in this exhibition will be in photography, drawing and film.

In 1994 Terry Smith began a series of site specific building interventions, creating his first wall cuttings in houses ready to be demolished and producing work often inaccessible to the public. Works that evolved from this period include Capital, 1995 an intervention in Gallery 49 at the British Museum; six wall cuttings at Tate Modern during its reconstruction in 1996, and at MACBA, Barcelona where he fired 35,000 staples – 1m wide and 25m long – into the walls of the museum. Preoccupied with exploring and experimenting in new media, recent projects by Smith, have included Broken Voices, The Foundling and in 2011 Caracol, a work made in Caracas, with twenty five singers. His most recent exhibition, Parallax, was a survey show of his work at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, curated by David Thorp. Smith is currently working on a project in Cuba with musicians and dancers.

Photographs printed by 31 Studio using the Platinum Process

Photographs printed by 31 Studio using the Platinum Process

http://www.31-studio.com/photographs.html

Paul Caffell Photographer

Point-Horizon-Structure: Photography and Experience
Jyll Bradley, Paul Caffell, Terry Smith
15 March - 28 April 

Paul Caffell's abstract paintings belong to the modernist tradition: they explore the process of mark making, the very language of painting, at the same time as they invoke a sense of intense concentration and stillness. Caffell's work has been inspired by avant-garde music since he began painting in the early 1960s, and belongs to the long search within modernism for an equivalent rhetoric of abstraction for painting. The paintings are at once profoundly gestural and understated, with the marks within an almost monochromic field often being the product of chance, but nonetheless often being delicate, sensitive and demanding careful work by the spectator to distinguish them. Caffell's work, then, is as much about time as it is about the mark: both the time of the painter, the meditated process of production, and the time of the spectator who, in their attention, is displaced from the everyday impacts of modernity on consciousness into their own wrapt, internal, world of experience with the artwork. Looking at a Caffell painting is much like listening to a chamber work by Kurtág, Henze or Nono, both painter and composer demand intense attention and reward it with a radically different form of consciousness.

Since the 1970s Caffell has also developed a photographic practice. His 'envelopes' - made with the unique platinum printing process - explore the almost abstract, sculptural properties of simple, easily discarded objects, actually containers for photographic film and printing paper - through their tonal range. In this sense these photographs are profoundly modernist, in their self-reference to the process of the production of the image, and beautiful, abstract works far removed from the 'realism' of photography. As near-monochromes there is also a clear articulation between the photographs and Caffell's paintings: both demand the same attention to subtle shifts of abstracted form and tone.

Paul Caffell has been painting since the early 1960s, when as an emerging young artist he was mentored by the leading British modernist critic, collector and painter, Roland Penrose. After exhibiting internationally during the decade, with work being purchased by several important collections, he withdrew to paint privately and developed his photographic practice. Mummery + Schnelle first showed Caffell's work in the group show 'To Become Like Music' in 2008, emphasising the influences and affinities of the paintings in the relationship between music and modernist painting and performance in the post-war avant-garde.

Platinum, le migliori fotografie del 31 Studio. Portando avanti la sua tradizionale attività di promozione artistica, Ersel ha esposto a gennaio 2011 una selezione di fotografie del prestigioso 31 Studio di Londra
Fondato da Paul Caffell nel 1988, il 31 Studio è il primo atelier inglese specializzato nella stampa al platino. La storia è costellata da fotografi di fama, che attraverso questo particolare processo di stampa hanno espresso non soltanto la loro esperienza di fotografi, ma in alcuni casi anche le qualità di pittori, scultori e storici del processo fotografico.

Tra gli scatti esposti spiccano firme come Bryan Adams, Bill Brandt, Alvin Langdon Coburn, William England, John Haynes, Barry Lategan, Linda McCartney, Lewis Morley, Terry O'Neill (foto a lato: Brigitte Bardot), Eugene Robert Richee, Jerry Schatzberg ed Angela Williams, oltre ad alcune immagini dell'Hulton Archive in collaborazione con Getty Images.

Attraverso la tecnica della stampa al platino i molteplici soggetti rappresentati danno vita ad immagini uniche e immutabili, in grado di esprimere una morbidezza ed una profondità che non ha eguali. Le stampe al platino, non deteriorabili per via della differente reazione alla luce, offrono all'occhio dello spettatore una particolare variazione di toni, in cui non esistono i bianchi e i neri assoluti ma finissimi toni di grigio. Questa tecnica, molto impiegata tra la fine del XIX e gli inizi del XX secolo, sta riscoprendo molti estimatori, soprattutto nei musei che conservano negativi storici.

http://www.youtube.com/

Paintings

Paul Caffell's abstract paintings belong to the modernist tradition: they explore the process of mark making, the very language of painting, at the same time as they invoke a sense of intense concentration and stillness. Paul Caffell's work has been inspired by avant-garde music since he began painting in the early 1960s, and belongs to the long search within modernism for an equivalent rhetoric of abstraction for painting. The paintings are at once profoundly gestural and understated, with the marks within an almost monochromic field often being the product of chance, but nonetheless often being delicate, sensitive and demanding careful work by the spectator to distinguish them. Caffell's work, then, is as much about time as it is about the mark: both the time of the painter, the meditated process of production, and the time of the spectator who, in their attention, is displaced from the everyday impacts of modernity on consciousness into their own wrapt, internal, world of experience with the artwork. Looking at a Paul Caffell painting is much like listening to a chamber work by Kurtág, Henze or Nono, both painter and composer demand intense attention and reward it with a radically different form of consciousness.

Chris Townsend