Simon Pantling
Slade School of Art 2005-2007
Manchester School of Art 1998-2003
simon@pantlingstudio.com
07970 482 004
Simon Pantling. Artist statement.
Manchester is a leisure facility today - restaurants, bars, and newly built apartments are everywhere. There’s no grand plan, and the city is in a continual state of growth and decline. I explore and draw the non places, the city's areas that developers overlook. The composition is formal and symmetrical and uses the language of architectural drawing to combine an area's original idea and it's disposition today. The drawings are not documentary but composed to depict urban evolution, change and the paradox of the new urban landscape.
Flyover exhibition at Studio2. Taken from the introductory text by artist and curator David Mackintosh.
There is a sense in his drawings that Pantling has a more conservationist approach, he is celebrating the city as a place of social exchange while rethinking how we might live in them. There is a metaphysical quality in how Pantling renders his drawings. Crosshatched Apple Pencil layers and absences within the spaces, or 'non-spaces' as the artist refers to them, create a fictive otherworldliness. His clarity of vision and execution give his drawings unity and fixes the idea of place. He works almost like a town planner or cartographer, using a mnemonic grid to recover information from a combination of experience and photographic records. This can be as simple as the detail of patterns left by the concrete casting process or the mundane formality of failed deck-access social housing. Pantling's drawings manage to incorporate the dominance of concrete’s ubiquity in the transformation of land for commerce, the sense of threat and dereliction associated with Manchester's 'none spaces,' with the optimism of the modernist viewpoint. He sees the potential of urban space. As if the act of drawing itself can be revolutionary.
Slade School of Art 2005-2007
Manchester School of Art 1998-2003
simon@pantlingstudio.com
07970 482 004
Simon Pantling. Artist statement.
Manchester is a leisure facility today - restaurants, bars, and newly built apartments are everywhere. There’s no grand plan, and the city is in a continual state of growth and decline. I explore and draw the non places, the city's areas that developers overlook. The composition is formal and symmetrical and uses the language of architectural drawing to combine an area's original idea and it's disposition today. The drawings are not documentary but composed to depict urban evolution, change and the paradox of the new urban landscape.
Flyover exhibition at Studio2. Taken from the introductory text by artist and curator David Mackintosh.
There is a sense in his drawings that Pantling has a more conservationist approach, he is celebrating the city as a place of social exchange while rethinking how we might live in them. There is a metaphysical quality in how Pantling renders his drawings. Crosshatched Apple Pencil layers and absences within the spaces, or 'non-spaces' as the artist refers to them, create a fictive otherworldliness. His clarity of vision and execution give his drawings unity and fixes the idea of place. He works almost like a town planner or cartographer, using a mnemonic grid to recover information from a combination of experience and photographic records. This can be as simple as the detail of patterns left by the concrete casting process or the mundane formality of failed deck-access social housing. Pantling's drawings manage to incorporate the dominance of concrete’s ubiquity in the transformation of land for commerce, the sense of threat and dereliction associated with Manchester's 'none spaces,' with the optimism of the modernist viewpoint. He sees the potential of urban space. As if the act of drawing itself can be revolutionary.
Flyover. Studio2, Todmorden. Taken from a review by artist and curator Paul Cordwell.
To further emphasis the compact between scientific tomfoolery and the hand wrought, the transcriptive feathery markings digitally formed to mesh into drawing-like expressions of a remembered moment are both convincingly engaging and offputtingly unnerving. Sophisticated and attractive, efficiently rendered but coolly indifferent, the cumulative effect is one of aesthetic pleasure in the alienness of the functional everyday.
To further emphasis the compact between scientific tomfoolery and the hand wrought, the transcriptive feathery markings digitally formed to mesh into drawing-like expressions of a remembered moment are both convincingly engaging and offputtingly unnerving. Sophisticated and attractive, efficiently rendered but coolly indifferent, the cumulative effect is one of aesthetic pleasure in the alienness of the functional everyday.