Charlotte Winifred Guérard’s practice is primarily concerned with testing the limitations of painting as an artistic format; a process she calls ‘painting beyond the frame’. In Matthew’s Boat, her solo exhibition at Palmer Gallery, Charlotte asks what painting is and what it can be, examining where the essence of the medium might lie. Is it the application of paint to a material; does its surface have to be a type of canvas; does it have to be stretched over wooden bars; or is the classification contingent on a work of art being wall-based? The elastic nature of artistic mediums, expressions and definitions means the answer is less important than the question. In Matthew’s Boat, Charlotte ponders these questions and experiments with painting as a form of installation, pushing the formal boundaries of an artistic discipline which is rarely disturbed.
Central to the exhibition is Charlotte’s ten-meter long canvas, St Ives Painting (2024), created during her residency at Porthmeor Studio in St Ives. The painting was initially housed in a mechanical scroll structure she built, which allowed her to manually reveal different sections of the canvas in turn - creating a type of painting in motion. During her residency, she showcased this work in five different St Ives locations: studio 5 at Porthmeor, Lamorna Cove, Tate St Ives’ Loggia, the Merry Maidens stone circle, and on the boat of a fisherman named Matthew. The exhibition also includes a Super 8 video of Charlotte operating the mechanism at these different sites.
A chief inspiration for the exhibition is Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound (1914), a four-and-a-half metre long work. Grant intended the painting to be viewed in a continuous slow movement across an aperture, generated by the mechanical motion of two spools. The artist intended that J. S. Bach should be played as the painting passed across the aperture. The work wasn’t displayed in its correct format until 1974, when the Tate built the necessary scrolling machine. A resulting film of the work in motion was shown on a screen at the Tate Britain, where Charlotte first saw it.
Elsewhere in Matthew’s Boat, Charlotte has fabricated a mobile steel frame to accommodate double sided canvases, allowing her work to be interacted with and physically moved, and thus elevating traditional painting into the realms of installation. The exhibition also includes work related to her board project: a daily undertaking whereby she made several hundred small oil paintings on board - a visual diary which captured everyday moments from her life, past and present. A range of the resulting images have been selected and transposed to larger canvases, painstakingly layered on top of one another to capture her experiences over time. A selection of small boards will be displayed in the gallery, alongside the larger multi-layered canvases.
In Matthew’s Boat, Charlotte invites viewers to explore the evolving boundaries of painting through a series of innovative installations and unconventional methods of display. As such, she challenges the very essence of the medium, breaking the boundaries between different disciplines while celebrating the fluidity of artistic expression.
“In many ways, Guérard’s studio is a laboratory; a place where the artist examines and builds on her ever-expanding repertoire of images and ideas, testing the boundaries of what is possible. It’s an art of process and accumulation, a way, she explains, of thinking about the agency of painting – not only ‘how it’s behaving’ but ‘how I’m behaving’. As much as she’s immersed in the art of the past, Guérard’s gaze is fixed firmly on the future. As she explains, she’s ‘taking a very traditional medium and thinking about how it can be looked at now’”.
Excerpt from ‘A Dictionary of Ideas and Images’, an essay by Jennifer Higgie.
