Bexhill delights

Gallery outside the Café of the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill

Bexhill boasts, I understand, the highest proportion of centenarians in the UK.  Unsurprisingly, this makes it one of the less exciting towns along the south coast.  However, it also boasts the De La Warr Pavilion, an Art Deco gem that has a popular art gallery as well as an auditorium regularly filled not only for the visiting Z-list pop-stars that blight seaside towns but also movies and live transmissions from opera houses and the National Theatre.  

Since it's a short, if painfully slow, drive from Hastings, we go over from time to time.  The other day we went to see the two exhibitions that are on, of works by Alison Turnbull and Matt Calderwood. 

The Pavilion's website says that Alison Turnbull is known for the intricate abstract paintings and drawings she creates from found materials, such as diagrams, plans, charts and maps. The exhibition presents new and recent works exploring ideas around observation, orientation and perspective.

In the course of my current MA my tutor, Eoghan Walls, has been emphasising the importance in contemporary poetry of the concrete and specific. As a result, there's a curious culture shock for me, now, in encountering conceptual works of visual art that are said to be "exploring ideas".  I've always been interested in contemporary art, though I find much of it baffling.  A curator friend of mine encouraged me, many years ago, not to be too analytical, but to "follow the clues".  I found this less helpful than picking up on what I came to think of as resonance - there were times when I hadn't the vaguest idea of what the artist was doing, but found myself thinking of it several days later.  

But I'm afraid it wasn't working with Alison Turnbull's carefully planned and detailed paintings, meticulously executed though they were.  Sometimes, I'm afraid, it's just a question of taste.  

On an upper level of the Pavilion, Matt Calderwood had assembled a group of structures that had stood outside in the open for a number of months and bore the effects of weather.  The Pavilion website says: Exposure Sculpture (2013) are geometric structures made from welded steel clothed in billboard paper. Located on the roof during the summer months, they have now been reassembled in the gallery space and reveal the results from the four months' exposure to the elements during the outdoor installation prior to the exhibition.  Sorry, Mr Calderwood, I don't get this either.  

Don't get me wrong.  I'm delighted to have been to these exhibitions and would like to understand a bit better what these artists are getting at.  In both cases the artists have given talks in the Pavilion, explaining their intentions,  It's a pity there's no recording of these presentations on the website.  It doesn't mean that understanding their intention better would necessarily make me like what they're dong.  But at least I'd be better informed.

As it is, I'm afraid we had to take refuge in the Trattoria Italiana, a bustling restaurant on the seafront, before ambling along the front in the sun.  There are worse ways of spending the day.    

Antony Mair