Neill Kidgell
Stations

Stations is a solo exhibition of new work by Neill Kidgell (b. 1981).

In these richly organised paintings Kidgell examines the urban geometries and grids of South East London’s edgelands that, in the artist’s own words, offer a balanced ‘exploration of painterly possibilities in the studio and a way of paying attention to and connecting with the physical environment.’ In large part, Kidgell’s paintings are abstractions, depicting the complexities of visual forms in their own self-referential structures, and yet these are pictures that ask the viewer to engage with the variegated, surreal, and labyrinthine textures of the contemporary city.

The etymology of the word station goes back via Old French and to the Latin for stare, ‘to stand’. Its early uses refer more generally to a ‘position’, or a ‘position in life’. Neill Kidgell has taken the framework of ‘stations’ for his present exhibition of paintings; they are conceptualised as successive points or markers in space, are interested in those zones of activity which serve transient purposes (or which facilitate transience and movement between plots in space), and embody a kind of diagrammatic quality in the forms of circles, rectangles, and grids which recollect the guiding visual networks of subway systems and trainlines. But it is in this older definition of station which I am interested in. What does it mean to stand where one is? What do we see from where we are, our position in life? How does the world look to us today? Kidgell’s work is interested in how we conceptualise and come to understand these questions, not merely through the extended metaphor of the station but more broadly in our relationship to the aggregated complexity of the modern city.

Kidgell lives and works in southeast London, and his studio complex is housed in a labyrinthine post-industrial district of Woolwich which looks out over the River Thames, the central artery of the capital which, in the words of poet John Challis, ‘burrows through the mud and clay / where every London interacts… the taken, the lost, the given’. Kidgell’s perspective is less a historical interest in the Thames – its centrality to Empire, for instance, and what Joseph Conrad called its ‘sea-reach… the beginning of an interminable waterway’ – but an incisive examination of its present. His subject is the architecture, weather, building sites and waste ground of this edgeland of riverside London, where ‘strange juxtapositions of new and old all find form in the work and give form to the conception of surface in painting as a site of change, memory and construction.’ Our eyes scour over the surfaces of his intimate pictures as when we look out onto the Thames from a distance, landing on moments of familiarity amidst the vastness, identifying the often perplexing accumulation of structures which populate its verge.

Responding to those ‘strange juxtapositions’, Kidgell enjoys experimenting with the resistance of the panel surface, which he finds similar in responsiveness to working on paper. The artist can scrape and sand down that surface, allowing him all the attended freedoms afforded to erasure; to make, unmake, and remake, as this part of the city has for centuries. In an essay by the cultural critic Brian Dillon entitled ‘The Revelation of Erasure’, he argues that the function of erasures is to make things disappear, but there is always ‘some detritus strewn about in the aftermath’. ‘What the eye picks out as meaningful on a printed or marked surface is mostly down to learning and convention: the legible text or image floats free of the surrounding remnants of abandoned language, meaningless doodles or flaws in the texture of the flat support’. Dillon writes: ‘[t]he real message hangs in the air like a street full of neon.’ By working through his surfaces in such a way that those residues of earlier mark-making, what Dillon calls the abandoned ‘surrounding remnants’, are still eerily present even if obliterated, Kidgell finds correspondence with the city itself. In this area of Woolwich, one is constantly rubbing up against the urban geometries and juxtapositions of past and present: be that the faded lettering on the brickwork of an old family-run business, the out-of-place positioning of the corporate business park bearing the title of a factory formerly on that site, or the startling incongruity of the partly-submerged MV Royal Iris, the Liverpudlian icon abandoned on the Thames. It is with these interventions onto the urban landscape that Kidgell’s work offers a singularly conceived correlative.

Spending time with Kidgell’s pictures, I am reminded of the football pitch markings in Raoul de Keyser’s work: in these deceptively simple, near abstractions we see a snapshot of the overlying logic of the full football pitch, with halfway line, eighteen-yard box and so forth. By zeroing in on only dislocated elements, de Keyser forecloses any fuller understanding of the interdependent visual matrix for the game’s rules, and so the function of the object is abstracted from its context. What is important in de Keyser’s pitch-markings is also true for Kidgell’s diagrammatic paintings. It is in the fact that beauty can be found in the most unlikely places: we do not need to know a marking’s function to be enlivened by its visual possibilities; we do not need to know what a sign means within the logic of the social world to respond intuitively, free from the burdens of overdetermined sense-making.

Take Junction (2024), for instance: what is the relationship between the red, blue, black, and washed-out green rectangles? Is this in any way a translated representation of a junction, a point where two or more things are joined, as seen from an aerial perspective? Equally plausible, might the distinct colours suggest the schematic representation of, say, the meeting point where four railway lines meet? While we tend to make aesthetic distinctions between painted surfaces and the visual language of our commute or our Sunday recreation, Kidgell’s work asks why this should be the case. ‘The paintings are typically intimate in scale and often appear fragmentary in composition’, Kidgell reflects, suggesting ‘a detail of a larger image or resembling places, structures and objects glimpsed in passing.’

In Fieldwork (2024), Kidgell renders six circles, each resembling a porthole looking out onto a nocturnal sea, which is accented with a line of green and set against a red background. They might be different colours but the circles, a recurrent motif in Kidgell’s work, feel in conversation with other iterations in this series, such as in Orbit (2024). We usually conceive of orbits as the curved path of a celestial object around a star or planet, but it can also mean an area of activity or influence: we might, for instance, conceive of friendships or other forms of interpersonal networks in such a way. By opening out the possibilities for sensorial consonance between, and not just within, the works, Kidgell gestures to the multifarious ways in which we conceive of relationality, or where we stand, vis-à-vis the orbit around us. This sense of relationality, and of the evocative textures of bright colour, asymmetrical lines and simplified shapes, reminds me of Mary Heilmann’s paintings. Like Kidgell, Heilmann incorporates polka dots alongside irregular rectangles; and like her, the poetry of his work lies in the pure rigidity of geometry rubbing up against the contingencies of artistic intervention. Revealingly, it is this which he defines as the tension between ‘precision and contingency.’

Several of Kidgell’s paintings are animated by this tension between precision and contingency. Perimeter (2024–25), for instance, features jagged edges in forest green, a deep red in the foreground, and an ochre line on the right. The background is a creamy yellow. Delicate diagonal lines in pale blue dance across the surface but they are not flush. We wonder if they might be the sketched lines of a perimeter fence, such as those used on building sites to delimit a temporary zone of inclusion and exclusion, safety and danger, private capital and public walkway.

Perhaps the work which plays with our expectations of spatial exactitude and the intuition of artistic intervention the most is Weather Patterns (2024–25). In this work, Kidgell employs his signature circles, swiped through in a whitish blue, alongside an enigmatic red square and five imperfect rectangles above. The surface of these rectangles is emergent and dynamic; it is as though the coarse brush hairs are still in motion across the picture plane as we encounter them. The pared-back background has been sanded down so we can see those possibilities engendered by erasure, once more, and consider the ways in which these forms communicate atmospheres. It is not, however, communicated at the level of representation, as we might expect from a landscape study. Instead, we can recognise something expressed to us in particular climactic conditions: it is less that the rectangles represent clouds, the circles rain, and the ochre line a foreground, as we might expect from the diagrammatic symbols of a weather report, but closer to the ways in which we feel the premonition of rain when the sky suddenly turns an ominous white.

Kidgell’s pictures have much to tell us about the ways in which we encounter the world, from whichever station we find ourselves. The artist has made this series of works over the past year, and despite their often-abstract quality offer a sense of recording time on the march, the slow yet perceptible passing of seasons, and the subtle shifts in atmospheric conditions when we stand in one place long enough to notice.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman