TREVOR BELL
'TRANS-FORM'

The core of the exhibition is a group of paintings made from the early 1990’s up to a selection of his final key works. In this exhibition Bell’s unique paintings provide the impetus for a transcendent sound score composed by multi-instrumentalist Jamie Mills. This and the elemental energy of Bell’s work have then been used as the source inspiration for a new contemporary dance work co-choreographed and performed by Sarah Fairhall and Lois Taylor. The images, sound score and dance have been combined in a video work made by Joseph Clarke and Alban Roinard which forms a key component of the exhibition.

‘Trans-Form’ was conceived and curated by Joseph Clarke, and was first shown at Peninsula Arts in partnership with The Box, Plymouth in 2018.

As someone who has worked closely with him for the last 10 years of his life, I had the privilege of continually encountering an artist capable of capturing and distilling physical and metaphysical complexity with a graceful rawness and sophisticated simplicity. In this day and age, where there is often such a disconnect between ‘us' and the ‘other', his work was ever profound and pertinent, ever-feeling, ever-seeing and ever-searching, and his work, as a result, never rested on its considerable laurels. His art was about so much more than himself. As he often said he “was just in the middle”.

The curator Chris Stephens (when head of displays at Tate Britain) said "Bell’s art is, in the loosest sense, spiritual. It evokes, or reflects, an idea of some abstract force that exceeds material reality... The dangers and losses of the modern world would be compensated through the rediscovery of natural order and process, and a renewed sense of individual identity would be established through the exploration of forces larger than ourselves. Bell’s work, one might say, has always derived in one way or another from this new sublime."

Albert Einstein once simply stated “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.” For Trevor the role as conduit allowed these expressions of force and energy, part of, yet greater than, oneself to be expressed on to the canvas. This role of conduit is one where the artist becomes an edge breached, where energy moves beyond threshold. This liminality is central to the art objects that Trevor has created. It was not about that energy being illusionistically represented on the canvas, but a gestural record of its journey. The shaped form allowed for that expression to continue beyond the edge of the work itself. The work was just an ongoing trace.

His final body of work ‘Beyond the Edge’ was exhibited at Anima Mundi in 2016. Key paintings from this period are included in this exhibition. They represented clearly Trevor’s intention for his expression to be read beyond the object itself, for the space around the work to become active. The period that preceded the making of his final paintings was also marked by his collaboration with the choreographer Rodger Belman in the States. Belman had responded to a series of Trevor’s drawings, which became choreographic studies for a series of performances in Florida. For Trevor this was exciting. His works as conduit. Literal borders breached once more.

Initial discussions around public exhibition in Plymouth began at the same time. It was natural therefore that this exhibition continued the work that had been started. The conceived project became an exciting one, to take key and favoured paintings from the studio, where transference of energy was intrinsic and allow them to serve as conduit for further forms of expression. To allow the spirit of, and in, the work to go beyond the edge. To transform - trans-form.

Our relationship was such that Trevor wanted to hand the project over to me, so that I in turn became a conduit for the project. Conversations continued with Belman in the States who’s connection was such that he was excited to build upon his previous work. I wanted the experience to be a more holistic and total experience so I approached Jamie Mills, knowing that he would respond, in the deepest sense, and energies began to flow. As the project began to take shape, with great shock and sadness Roger Belman at the age of 56 was diagnosed with cancer and passed away shortly after in October 2017, In addition Trevor’s health began to deteriorate and he passed away just weeks later. The pertinence of their departure added a huge weight of epitaphic responsibility to the exhibition, but also a poetic depth and resonance leaving clear and weighty understanding of how energy and spirit can remain and transcend all confines. Sarah Fairhall and Lois Taylor took choreographic reigns for the exhibition and we followed the flow. The resultant exhibition and related performances are a celebration of spirit, liminality and transformation.

I’m so proud to be a part of this most fitting of tributes.

Joseph Clarke, 2018

In 1955, Bell moved from Yorkshire to West Cornwall, and found himself part of the community of abstract artists that had made their home there. But unlike many of his St Ives contemporaries, Bell was never really a Modernist artist, concerned with the pursuit of pure forms or exploring the limits of painting. He was someone who followed his own meta-physical path, constantly crossing boundaries and navigating the unseen, seeing each painting as an expression or part of something bigger.

Bell wanted his paintings to become objects, his experiences to become sensations, and his colours and forms to be an actual presence. Yet the problem he found when using conventional canvases, with their right angled corners and straight edges, is that the viewing gaze is instinctively drawn inwards and held within the space of the painting. So, in the 1960’s, Bell began to work with shaped canvases, using lines he had drawn spontaneously onto the studio wall as templates for bending the wooden frames of his canvases into sinuous forms. These ‘active contours’ didn’t draw the eye in, but forced it outwards to the edges, and from the edges into the space beyond. Colours and forms were no longer contained by solid, hard borders or reduced to an element of visual language, they existed in their own right; a mesmerising presence whose dynamic energy seemed to flow into the world.

Most recently, Bell had pushed the potential of the active contour even further in constructions such as Bird[2016] and Balance[2016], where he created a visual see-saw, with two canvases balanced on top of a curving timber arc. The image has become a sculptural object and colour has become a noun with weight and relativity.

The colours that saturate Bell’s canvases have an obvious presence, but so do the marks that bring them into the world. They provide a choreographic notation of Bell’s moving arm; tracing intent and hesitation, the passage of time and the consistency of the paint flowing through the bristles of the brush. Like words, these graphic gestures and descriptive lines bring character to the canvas, helping to introduce each work’s visual narrative;

Some of Bell’s gestures are a bold statement, sending the viewer’s gaze scurrying across the painted surface and beyond; the clash of colour against colour leaving a livid scar as their electric borders erupt in a burst of uncontrollable visual energy. Others are like a pigment whisper that leaves a barely perceptible trace as one tone gently dissolves into another, generating an evanescent haze.

Bell’s lines don’t always occur on the surface of the canvas, however. With our gaze directed towards the painting’s edge we become aware of those shadow-lines and imperceptible highlights that paint the surrounding wall. They create a constantly shifting penumbra that animates and activates these works, an edge, yet not an edge, holding and caressing them, blurring and blending the solid and the immaterial. Bell deliberately explored this transitional space in works such as Windance 1 and 2[2010], where the wooden lines that usually define each canvas’s border have been freed to follow a lyrical path of their own. They tease and probe this liminal zone, reaching out into the unknown, whilst attached to the familiar.

Bell’s work has a zen-like simplicity: a self-contained rootedness in that space between inhalation and exhalation, which is the present. At one level they are about nothing: they don't refer to anything, they are not subject to anything - They are. But at the same time they are also products of embodiment. Their colours and forms are born out of an artist who stood in the Himalayas and contemplated the dance of clouds scudding across the sky, and looked down on rivers carving their path through distant valleys; someone who watched a rocket launch into space in a blaze of luminous energy, and who stood each day and looked out at the wind-scoured landscape around his studio. Bell translated these experiences into sensations, using colour and form to evoke the meta-physical, exposing the moment when matter transitions from being into nothingness, and formlessness becomes form.

Bell’s desire to transcend the limits of form lies at the heart of this posthumous work and exhibition, Trans-Form, which was initiated with his blessing before his death in November 2017. As an artist who had constantly sought to cross the boundaries of his paintings, he had been fascinated at how they might also cross the boundaries between different art forms. He was particularly interested in the possibility of working with a composer and choreographer to create a work that explored the intersections of these different languages. Whilst, he himself would never see the results of this collaboration, the conversation that occurs between Bell’s paintings, Jamie Mills’ sound and Sarah Fairhall’s and Lois Taylor’s movement, brings this project to striking fruition.

To look at Bell’s paintings, whilst enveloped by Mill’s music and Fairhall and Taylor’s choreographed response, is to be reminded of form’s bodily origins. Here are slow breaths as white is born, the staccato edges of a line as the pianist’s fingers depress a piano’s keys, before slowly dissolving into the surrounding silence, the long legato of a sweeping gesture, or the frenzied sounds as tiny marks claw their way into being through blazing white. Sounds sweep and soar as lines dance across windswept surface and bodies rise and fall in exaltation. They echo, pulsate, blur, vibrate, build and linger. Colour may come from outside us, a star-born revelation that reveals the world in technicolour glory, but form comes from within, born of our bodies and movement; a universal language that ultimately transcends music, painting, dance and even our individual selves.


(Richard Davey is an internationally published author, curator and member of the International ‘Association of Art Critics’. He is a judge of the John Moores Painting Prize 2016 and recently wrote the major exhibition publication for Anselm Kiefer’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 2014 alongside the 2015 and 20 16 ‘RA Summer Exhibition’ catalogues.)