Spirit Level
Andrew Beck

Spirit Level sees Andrew Beck working with APS Editions to develop a series of works that extend the imagery of his photogram practice into printmaking.

Like the photograms, the works in the Spirit Level series combine hard-edged abstract compositions with lush, atmospheric gradients and fields of colour. Beck’s practice often functions like this, adopting a post-Minimalist approach that subtly undermines the sterile, self-contained unity of the modernist picture plane by drawing attention to the presentation, materiality and conceptual baggage surrounding the work of art. The Spirit Level monotypes retain a hand-made quality, their occasional rough edges and misalignments imparting a sense of grit and tactility to the work.

As monotypes, the Spirit Level works mark a move away from the concerns around light and optics that are central to much of Beck’s earlier output and towards a focus on the pleasure of materiality and the complex tension between precision and irregularity inherent to the print medium. In adapting his practice to monotype, Beck has worked with master printmaker John Pusateri to develop a process that includes hand-rolled gradients (as seen in traditional Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints), multiple transparent colour layers and custom-formulated colour-shifting iridescent inks. The resulting works, while made on a printing press, are one-offs rather than editions.

The images are constructed by layering multiple passes of transparent colour onto the paper, reinterpreting the stacking of transparent glass layers Beck has used to similar effect previously. This gives the works their rich colour depth, while also imparting a sense of grain and texture that is new to Beck’s practice. Rather than being tightly planned and controlled, the development of these works has been an iterative, exploratory process, in which minor mistakes and misalignments have been used as springboards to inform further image-making. To create the forms and other compositional elements of the work, hand-cut sheets of paper, plastic and aluminium are used as masks, creating a complex, stacked construction. Many of the colours seen in the works are created on the paper itself, due to the overlapping of transparent ink layers.

As mentioned above, some of the works include custom inks that combine titanium-oxide-coated mica powder and colloidal silica in an oil base, to create a non-pigmented media that imparts optically shifting colour by refracting light, like a prism. The impetus behind this was to create a printmaking analogue to the iridescent titanium-coated glass panels that Beck has used elsewhere in his practice to implicate the viewer’s eye, and by extension their subjectivity, into the structure of the work.

The content of the Spirit Level works shows a formally looser, more experimental side of Beck’s practice, pushing on the boundaries of the rigid visual language he has previously worked within. They retain the diagrammatic formality characteristic of Beck, but complicate these strategies through their small imperfections–a sliver of white paper from a misaligned mask or a smudged edge adding a depth of humanity and a glimpse of the artist’s hand. These images are irradiated and populated by an array of blacks, yellows, oranges, teals and purples, masking, overlapping and transforming to delineate tense, humming geometric compositions, each a jewel or icon that hints at some obscure devotional purpose.