| The drawings in Fiona Banner’s exhibition appear
to be works of eye-grabbing Minimalism. There’s an eight-foot-tall
sheet entirely covered by the metallic gray sheen of graphite, and there
are several sheets of similar size bearing a large round or nearly round
shape also made of heavily worked graphite. The shapes have an almost
sculptural punch. But as is often the case with apparently Minimalist works these days, Ms. Banner’s works have a complicated intellectual background. You are led to suspect as much by an eighth drawing, which consists entirely of carefully drawn but idiosyncratically formed words conveying a confusingly hectic narrative: "The flames chew through the furnace and warp everything, they’ve got oily faces it’s the last day," it begins. This, it turns out, is the artist’s condensed description of the movie "The Deer Hunter." It relates to an earlier project called "The Nam" (not in this show): a 1,000-page, self-published volume of Ms. Banner’s exhaustively detailed descriptions of six Vietnam War movies, including "Apocalypse Now," "The Deer Hunter" and "Full Metal Jacket." The movie narratives led Ms. Banner to think about punctuation marks and eventually to the drawings in this show. The circles and ovals, in fact, represent periods in different typefaces enlarged to about two feet in diameter. She has also sculptured giant Brancusi-like periods in styrofoam, unfortunately not included here. All this quirky conceptual and formal logic makes this young British artist someone whose future bears watching. |
