Florence Peake brings dancing canvases to spectacular modern church in south London

The austere hovering chamber of Dilston Gallery within the former Clare Faculty Mission Church in Southwark Park is one among London’s most spectacular areas. In-built 1911 it was the primary poured concrete constructing within the UK and was described on the time as “the best fashionable church in south London”—though the barn-like constructing, with its stark lofty inside, has extra in frequent with the early Italian Romanesque than the twentieth century-Modernist.

Since being taken over by Southwark Park Galleries within the early Nineteen Eighties, Dilston has supplied a few of my most memorable artwork experiences, whether or not remodeled right into a shimmering inexperienced chamber of dwelling grass by Ackroyd & Harvey, haunted by the prowling presence of the late Brian Catling or full of a cavorting throng of Anne Ryan’s fantastical colored sculptures.

Now this evocative place is being magnificently animated by Florence Peake in Factual Precise, a multi-layered, performative, queer gesamtkunstwerk, which performs with and off the ritualistic connotations of its environment to actually grapple with the historical past of portray. Seven huge unstretched canvases painted by Peake dangle from the beams of the vaulted ceiling earlier than being sporadically raised and lowered by six performers utilizing pulleys and ropes. Winched up and down and hooked and unhooked, Peake’s big vivid work of tumbling multi-gendered figures are additional animated by being dragged, crumpled, propped and used to cowl, cover and home each performers and generally viewers members. Now not passive objects to be gazed upon, the canvases develop into lively individuals within the piece, swooshing alongside the shiny white ground, getting down and soiled with the dancers, engulfing the viewers and even having their surfaces scratched to kind an aural backdrop to the motion.

Factual Precise had its first incarnation within the coronary heart of London’s Nationwide Gallery, the place the shut proximity of all these Previous Masters gave an additional cost to Peake’s gender fluid canvas-action. Within the naked dramatic setting of Dilston, the piece has now been prolonged and developed and the art-history ante upped even additional. Up on a raised stage-like chancel the place the altar would have been, one of many dancers crouches on her palms and knees. She rolls down her paint-splattered boiler go well with to the waist and one other performer vigorously covers her higher physique with paint. Because the chilly paint splatters onto her naked flesh, a microphone is thrust in her face for her to learn aloud from handwritten, random fragments of canonical art-historical texts extolling the same old white male pantheon of Cézanne, Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, Pollock et al. These are being busily transcribed by one other performer from a stack of artwork books and catalogues, together with a number of from the Nationwide Gallery.

Sensuous slathering

The symbolism of what’s going down may appear primary, however like all of us, Peake has a sophisticated relationship with these grand painterly traditions. Messages due to this fact develop into more and more combined because the paint utility veers between savage gesture, sensuous slathering and slapstick humour. Is that this physique being anointed, violated, pleasured or ridiculed? Or all the above? Because the susceptible dancer calls the pictures and barks out orders to her text-suppliers, it turns into much less clear who’s dominating whom.

All through Factual Precise’s two-hour run, the boundaries between portray, efficiency, physique and materials soften and merge throughout the emotional spectrum. At one level a dancer seems with head and physique encased in scale-like armoured plates of vividly painted canvas. This disquieting paint deity appears each malevolent and tragicomic as, weighed down and blinded by this encrustation of impastoed medallions, which Peake has described as externalised “lumps of grief as condensed matter”, they navigate a tortuously sluggish route across the edges of the house. Then are we meant to ridicule or pity one other character that blunders and stumbles down the size of the constructing, entangled in portray stretchers whose canvases have been torn off?

There are extra conversations with the reside work unfolding throughout city in a solo present of Peake’s new work, sculpture, installations and works on paper at Richard Saltoun gallery, aptly titled Enactment. Right here unstretched canvases kind giant sculptural installations whereas a pair of gaunt angular figures in wooden and plaster recline in contemplation earlier than a variety of the painterly medallions which have now migrated from being a part of a dancer’s costume to be mounted on the wall as works in their very own proper.

But once more, within the fluid, shape-shifting world of Florence Peake, classes dissolve, nothing is mounted or finite and every part and something is feasible.

• Florence Peake: Factual Precise, Southwark Park Galleries, London till 2 July after which touring to Fruitmarket, Edinburgh October 2023 and Towner Eastbourne in early 2024; Florence Peake Enactment – Richard Saltoun Gallery, 30 Might- 15 July