2024 ALL WE HAVE IS NOW
Galeria Hilario Galguera Mexico Madrid

by Icka Gallego
A hypnotic sensation permeates the gallery space. Despite the silence and stillness, circular paintings from different series convey a sense of movement, perhaps evoking their origin: an analysis of the impact of sound on water and the materiality of sound waves led to the creation of the Harmonics series, which later evolved into the OM Halo and Stella series. Even during their creation, the artist remains almost motionless while the paintings rotate on their own to absorb oil or acrylic. The Spiral Void series explores the emptiness that has been studied throughout history in philosophy and art. The circles in the series seem to turn into mirrors, reflecting the doubts and thoughts of each individual.

These series create a phenomenon the artist calls a perceptual leap, where the sense of depth is lost, and the viewer feels as if they are inside the painting, in a meditative field. The reduction of the painting to seemingly simple elements and forms is an attempt by the artist to investigate a universal truth, when halos and aureoles of saints and Buddhas can be interpreted, but also the displacement of energy in the form of light and sound.

The Grid series examines reality through sacred geometry with meticulously painted grids in acrylic. Inspired by the geometric structures found in nature and the cosmos, these works aim to reveal the order and harmony hidden in the apparent chaos of the contemporary world. Similarly, the Fade series offers an escape from the disorder and oversaturation of today’s urbanity. Its faded colors are ghosts of the way the artist stores memories in his mind. Memories of family moments, the movement and feeling of air, sunsets, sunrises, or fog, the artist captures specific moments with gradient tones, seeking to replicate the sensation of each experience, turning a unique experience into universal feelings.

All We Have is Now invites us to lose ourselves for a moment in the present, capturing our gaze and captivating us with a language that transcends cultural differences to offer an introspective space for reflection and peace. Marsden’s work comes as a much-needed breath before our return to everyday life.

2022 IN PRAISE OF LIGHT: THE KOUMI PAINTNIGS
Gallery 38 Tokyo

by Millie Walton
British artist Oliver Marsden has been making art for over thirty years. While his work has evolved over time, influenced by his day-to-day encounters and travels as well as time spent working in the studio of Damien Hirst, his practice remains largely focused on transcendental experiences of the natural elements – light, water, gravity, air and his love of music.

‘I went to art college at the start of the nineties and spent the best part of that decade in the studio, or nightclub dancing between speakers. I think that’s still what it comes back to: the love of light and music, the journey that they can take you on,’ he says. He works with a diverse range of materials from car paint to acrylics, oils, and spray paint, employing original techniques to create vivid, luminous forms that simultaneously captivate and elude the gaze.

However, while the works themselves possess an almost ethereal quality, Marsden’s approach to making art is largely methodical. Once at the studio he begins by preparing himself psychologically to create. Quietening his mind by concentrating on his breath, simple yoga, and readying the studio.

His focus on breath evolved through his use of respirators to protect from paint fumes. ‘When wearing a respirator for hours, you become aware of your breath, breathe too hard and you expel condensation onto the painting, a natural steady breath is best.”

Without realizing it, the use of respirators led to a breathing practice akin to Anapana meditation and helped me to focus. I now use respirators less but continue with the breathing practice.’

Marsden also tends to work in thematic series, embracing repetition as another form of mindfulness that offers a sense of creative renewal and circularity. As such, each piece he creates forms part of an ongoing visual diary that records both a very specific point in time and the evolution of his artistic practice.

Marsden’s first solo exhibition in Japan, ‘In Praise of Light’ held at the Koumi Machi Kougen Museum in 2009, in which he made thirty-three works during a six month residency, Marsden comments:

‘Looking back, our time in Koumi was so special. The residency provided the space and opportunity to intensely focus. We travelled and experienced much of Japanese culture. My standout memory is when we visited an exhibition of National Treasures from the Tenpyo period at the Nara National Museum. I was struck by a sculpture of priest Ganjinwajo. The lines of his robes had such fluidity and balance, they gave life to the sculpture. I stood mesmerised as I began to see the creases in the monk’s robe flow like music. And in that moment, I felt an absolute connection. A feeling in my chest of belonging, a connection to humanity past and present and at one with the universe.’ The works presented in this latest exhibition include some of the pieces made during the residency and in the following years.

While making for Marsden requires routine, the impetus to create often comes from a fleeting encounter or what the artist describes as a ‘feeling of synchronicity’ whereby his observations and thoughts appear to align, creating a powerful feeling of harmony or wholeness. For instance, the initial concept for the Harmonic paintings, several of which feature in this exhibition, was born from Marsden absentmindedly throwing pebbles into a bucket of water in his studio. He took photographs of the ripples across the surface and found himself connecting the images with the idea of sound waves vibrating through space.

‘I started imagining these giant liquid speakers that emit colour,’ he remembers. The earliest pieces in this series were created by Marsden spinning his arms around while spraying paint onto the canvas, resulting in translucent halos of colour. Over time this technique has evolved into Marsden building motorised ‘spin machines’, one of which comprises a broken chair mounted to the wall, allowing him to spin the surface while brushing and spraying the paint, offering a greater level of precision and fluidity as well as depth.

The most recent iterations of the series depict an intense orb of colour that appears almost black at its centre, becoming lighter as it expands outwards and eventually fades back into white. The progression of colour and form resonates with the natural inhale and exhale of breath, connecting the viewer’s gaze back to not just their own body, but also the presence of the artist.

Meanwhile, Liquemorph, one of the artist’s oldest series that he first started in 1996 while he was living and studying in the US, evolved from the artist’s attempts at figuration. While this rather more traditional foundation might not be immediately visible, Marsden describes the spherical shapes that appear floating in misty hues of colour as being ‘geometric human elements.’ ‘When I started the series, I was interested in the relationship between man and nature, but also in the body as something more abstract moving through space like when you’re on the dance floor of a club, surrounded by dry ice and lights and there’s this deep feeling of interconnection, of the edges of things becoming blurred,’ he explains. More recently, Marsden has started thinking about the series in relation to ideas around Buddhist meditation as well as the concept of afterimages that form optical illusions in the eye and alter our perception of the image.

Indeed, as we gaze at the surface, the spherical shapes appear to almost shiver or pulsate, simultaneously emerging from and retreating into the background. In this way, the image itself becomes endlessly renewing, offering a fresh perspective each time we return to contemplate the canvas.

2018 THE GRID PAINTINGS
by Colin Glen
Oliver Marsden’s new series of works, his Grid Paintings, continue his process of presenting at what appear at first sight To be simple elementary principles; blurred points, concentric circles, yet that uncannily begin to move in front of the viewer as they spend time with them. The Grid works are made with precise masked lines that give way to a colour ground below which alludes both to the graph paper of study textbooks and to an ethereal sense of light and space. The lines that read as a familiar grid structure, the stable framework for planning structures, in Marsden’s work begin to shift imperceptibly lending the work his trademark vertiginous effect as the viewer becomes aware of the subtle balance of increments of line width and paced spacing.

Indeed, for Marsden, the works are a form of meditation on measurement, whose incisions arose from his critical practice of deciding what to leave out, what to remove in order that a piece could work; occurring while drawing designs on his customary graph paper one day in the studio - he at once saw the grid itself as the subject. The canvases he used were destined for waterfall erosion paintings that themselves now bear a sense of unending movement, the sense of Heraclitus’s ‘never the same river twice’, a movement that is present in all matter and all seeing. This ludic element, where the eye and mind of the viewer are kept moving is a result of Marsden’s fascination with games and systems that involve mathematical propositions. In this his work strikes a chord with much of the developments in the US in the 1960s where artists took inspiration from the daily world, the world beyond the tradition of Romantic introspection in the studio, to create pieces that sat as real objects in the real world.

Marsden refers to artists such as Oliver Mosset, Daniel Buren and Barnett Newman as seminal influences particularly the former’s intention to reach a ‘degree zero of painting’, where individual artistic authorship was reduced in favour of a ‘dialogue with the history of abstraction’ - an open discussion, sharing of tropes and forms. Such a teleological dialogue is where the critic Rosalind Krauss writing in the late 1970s would sit interpretations of the emblem of the ‘Modernist’ grid that she said for the early pioneers of abstraction, Malevich and Mondrian, was ‘a staircase to the universal’, a mantle that Marsden inherits. For her the grid device was constrained by the rift begun in the nineteenth century between science and religion, ‘matter and spirit’, that artists since have had to chose sides. An example she gives is of the literal materiality of the grid works of Ad Rheinhardt or Agnes Martin but she qualifies this as saying that such artists ‘mask’ the innate sacred associations of the grid with a ‘myth’ of materialism as overt reference in Modernism would be ‘embarassing’. However, it is specifically through the scientific principles of structure and order that Marsden connects with spirituality as ancient as that of the Celts with interweaving knotwork patterning or the Buddhist Thangka votive practice paintings. His increments of measure beat out that to the rhythm that balances out his in and out breaths in yogic meditation. For him, each spacing is ‘all about the decisions’ which make work connect with the harmony of the bodily and universal. Marsden’s discovery is that it is precisely in the ‘stripping away’ to bare material of science that ultimately one connects with the spiritual plane. He sees the process of “laying down the lines each time in different orders throws up conundrums, puzzles of unimaginable obstacles and problems to solve…essentially informed by chance…There’s no you should have gone this way or that way…it’s what happens…like Yves Klein’s ‘Leap into the Void’. You don’t know the future, you need the belief to keep going, to take that leap of faith…as does the mischievous Hindu monkey God, Hanuman, it’s all a play.

2017 EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING Vigo Gallery London
A DAILY PRACTICE

by Colin Glen
You could see Oliver Marsden’s creative process, his daily practice, as all preparation – a preparation to see – a clearing away, a focusing of perception, in order for his paintings to speak, or rather sing for themselves. Not only are his works replete with musical references, it is his whole approach, his praxis that accords with a musical sensibility – he ‘attunes himself’ in his preparation to make a painting – his daily routines evolved over a 25-year span of painting with physical and mental discipline.

He trains himself in the art of seeing as a form of listening, which has echoes in a comment by Cherry Smyth writing in the recent edition of artmonthly magazine, ‘one of the joys of abstract painting is when the act of ‘looking for’ loses its purpose and looking becomes a kind of receiving’. Indeed, as Marcel Duchamp proposes in his 1957 lecture, ‘The Act of Creation’, ‘The artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing’.

Marsden equates daily practice with such physical activities as practicing a tennis serve, or the repetitive hitting of a squash ball against the court wall, in doing so fine-tuning technique whilst simultaneously fine-tuning the self – apt here as Marsden’s oeuvre involves balancing wavelengths of sound, of sensing the resonances of light and sound. In a synaesthetic sense, sound becomes light and vice versa. Marsden’s Harmonic series derive from a pertinent and definitive moment in the artist’s career when he observed ripples in a bucket caused by loud guitar riffs being played in a recording booth below his studio in central Gloucester. This experience chimed with his desire to make a visual analogue for his concept of a ‘liquid speaker’ to create a painting that vibrated with the same resonance as a music speaker. He wanted to make sound sculpturally present in the sense that it affected the space it inhabits, as in the way Minimalist sculpture, such as that of Robert Morris, operates.

For Marsden, there is a point reached when making a work becomes ‘true to itself’, a point at which he can then release it. His studio is now deep in rural Gloucestershire. As he speaks he looks out to the landscape, his ‘out breath’ where he runs and cycles. He relates the ‘true’ point of a painting to the presence of Nature, to the world outside. There is an affinity here with a statement Brice Marden said of his relationship with his work ‘When I sit here looking at (my finished paintings) I am incapable of identifying with them personally. I don’t see these as myself. One of the things about being a painter is that you’re trying to make things that you want to see. It’s more like knowing yourself by forgetting yourself. Learning not to be so involved with yourself.’

This is appropriate for Olly Marsden, as he associates with the Light and Space group from Los Angeles whose concern is to affect the environment in which the viewer experiences the work through the play of colour and light. As with Marsden’s paintings there is not such a separation between the conceptual, process-based element of his practice from its phenomenological presence. This is most true of his Blue Harmonic series that originated in 2003 with the work Node I. The principle effect on the viewer is physical, a rippling and enfolding as the Harmonic paintings draw you in with their pulsations, emitting a humming sensation and guide you out again by means of visual steps, incremental stages of painted concentric circles that enhance the sense of gradualism. As you enter what at first appears to be a dark centre, it then opens up and folds out in an apparent inversion, giving you the sense of riding a wave or a roller coaster feeling of falling and rising with the undulations of the landscape. The apparent same image, through the recognition of blueness and circularity, alters as you notice the subtlety perceptible in each blue painting.

The slight shift from painting to painting is as transformative as a quantum leap. Here Marsden concords with the conceptual systems of an artist such as On Kawara whose date paintings, seemingly the same highlight difference at a fundamental level with solely the change in dates and times. The disciplined regularity of the system marks the eternal flow of time, the Derridean alterity at the heart of things, where each moment becomes a new possibility and hence an entirely new universe in itself. Such incremental shifts in the paintings are analogous with the regularity and difference in each flower of a particular species - as Marsden notes in his fascination with sacred geometry, elucidated by Keith Critchlow, worth quoting at length from his 2011 book ‘The Hidden Geometry of Flowers’; ‘As Heraclitus said, ‘Nature loves to hide’, which could also be interpreted as, ‘Nature loves to hide its principles of existence.’

This again is a reminder of how Plato’s character Timaeus begins his explanation of the nature of the ‘made’ universe. ‘It is fabricated’, he says, ‘of Sameness, Otherness, and Being (or Essence)’. Such is true of all principles or laws of Nature. They are the same in principle, but expressed differently in each instance. Flowers too are recognisably of a particular plant, as are the leaves of that plant. However, each flower and each leaf is quite demonstrably different from every leaf of the same genus or species. Analysing flowers for their archetypal geometry requires a careful and consistent discipline. This discipline is a balance between ‘intuitive thinking’ and a ‘reasonable proposal’ or the most likely story as Plato insists in the Timaeus.’ Hence Olly Marsden’s conviction that ‘the act of painting changes your state of mind’ – he regards the works as ‘gifts’ that he calls down in a shamanic sense. His ‘daily practice’ with its ‘highs and lows’ is emblematized in his Sine wave images as a diagrammatic equivalent for the movement and behaviour of the Harmonic series. Crucially the perceptual shift when, as a viewer, you see the incremental shift between each Harmonic is not slight in its consequences. A slight difference becomes ALL the difference. This is the gift, the opening of awareness, a beginning to learn, a starting to see.

Colin Glenn

Olly Marsden in email conversation 13.02.17; ‘Hi Col, I think the daily practice means your work becomes the collection of all your highs and lows, mediocre days, genius days…Paint when you’re up paint when you’re down. The work slowly reveals itself. Bliss is dangerous - it has a flipside in that you need sadness to feel joy, you need black to understand white - the OMs sing with a clear voice, the Harmonics resonate the emotions of colour like strings, the Dubs black hole vortices, portals, vehicles allowing movement between extremes, in out black white, here there past present.’

2017 THE ISOMETRIC PAINTINGS
by Colin Glen
Oliver Marsden’s Isometric paintings develop the perceptual shift present in the incremental changes of the Harmonics, where noticing a slight difference becomes all the difference, an awareness of differentiation per se, into works that the viewer is actively in dialogue with, opening as Marsden states ‘the doors of perception into seeing an abstract space’.

At a formative stage in his career he experienced a hallucinatory vision of the fourth dimension as an isometric space where he saw that ‘everything’ accords to the same geometrical principles. For him this is represented by the life cycle of a flower, whose pattern of emergence, growth, bloom and evanescence underlies the drawn structure of the Isometric works.

This ‘Everything’, for Marsden is more like a state of continual becoming of the Presocratic philosopher, Heraclitus, than the world of pure forms of Plato - Marsden’s favourite saying of the former being, ‘The path up and the path down are one and the same’. This notion is uncannily similar to concepts in Eastern mysticism as outlined by the philosopher Alan Watts of the out breath in the yogic practice of mindfulness. The geometrical process of bifurcation, the splitting at the core of growth, is metaphoric for the notion of dialogue that Marsden presents in how the Isometrics function, indeed are constructed by the viewer. In each work the differently suspended elements seem at once to cohere into recognisable figure forms to then disassemble - separating into continuously moving architectonic steps.

However, with various of the Isometric pieces seen together there is an evocative sense that the viewer is taken, albeit through differing arrangements, to the same place – that geometric principle of becoming. It is informative to compare this function with the Harmonics series where conversely the apparent same initial image takes the viewer, in each instance, to a different place - the incremental changes in colour and concentric rings emitting differing resonant visual frequencies. The awareness that the same principles guide the atomising parts of the Isometrics and the coalescing cores of the Harmonics stimulates the idea that every thing is Everything.

Colin Glenn

2015 ELEMENTOS SUSPENDIDOS Galeria Hilario Galguera, Mexico
I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

by Oliver Marsden
I’ve been here before, looking for words for paintings. I write notes often, texts rarely.

I prefer paint to words. I am a painter, I work hard to create paintings which offer an experience that cannot be captured through photography or words.

The paintings are no longer here, they left the studio three weeks ago. It was an intense build, I am still trying to slow down and ground myself.

I began with the Harmonics in early summer of last year. Summer suits oil painting, I can open windows and doors to ventilate the studio, paint dries quickly and the light is strong. I have many new oil paints that I am eager to try.

Preparing the canvasses takes weeks, but this is when I begin to focus. I size and gesso them myself, checking and refining the surfaces. Once prepared, I spin them vertically and apply the oil paint with brushes.

I will have a colour in mind as I drive to the studio. But often, I throw myself a last minute curve ball and start with a random colour. Or I simply go with the colours that catch my eye when mixing the palete.

I work fast to catch the light, mixing and laying down beats and echoes of colour across the canvass, pulling and pushing the paint with my brush. I stand back and look for a balance that intrigues the eye and sings with light. A balance that breathes with a movement in, and a movement out, and that holds the poise of a Buddha.

Sometimes I get close, other times I need to accept that today is just another step, and put the work aside. You never know, things happen as they dry.

I spin Cobalt Violet halos to suspend dark interior spirals, seemingly floating them in front of and behind the picture plane. As the months pass I add layers upon layers, working with opaque and transparent mixes. I lose myself in colour and music.

The days begin to shorten and daylight dwindles as we move through Autumn into Winter. I cut ventilation to keep the studio warm to aid drying, fumes build, I am saturated with turpentine and oil. The studio is a dance of Harmonics.

I move onto the Stella paintings. I last painted one in 2009, I don’t quite remember how. I hadn’t planned to make anymore but an idea, a vision of a Rose Diamond keeps returning. I research the shape and use the geometry of the Vesica pisces, the square root of 3 for the proportions of the stretchers. I build three, I start with the smallest, I add too much violet. But I now know the colours I need for tomorrow.

It is late to start painting, close to lunch, this makes me nervous but I must begin.I brush thick coats of rose and magenta oil paints, I spin and erode with turpentine, and repeat. I increase the speed to create centrifugal force, and almost fall as I hit a trance inducing stroboscopic rhythm. Five hours later I’m flying and the painting is resting.

A good friend visits we talk of the diamond realm, goddesses, death and children; then dance like it’s 1996. The Rose calls for a partner, but I must rest. I dream of a green Goddess. The Kyma panel is ready to carve, I’m going for 7 waves, I sketch proportions in charcoal, bow and begin. I find the rhythm and flow of the curves quickly, I’m happy. I move to spin the spirals, the aluminium spiral takes weeks, the pigment spiral seconds.

At night I have been developing and evolving models for the Prototype paintings, but it is now time to commit. They are sketched onto the canvas in pencil, I mix and test greys. They are so large I paint them on their sides. The two lighter grays first, I’m unsure, I can’t tell how they will look. The darkest grey painted, tape is removed and the paintings turned upright. They are stangely calligraphic, and playful. I’m pleased with my decision to remove perspective and keep them geometric, the lack of perspective somehow takes you into an abstract space and gives an unexpected optical effect. I add elements and tweak the arrangements.

I carefully take the paintings off their stretchers and roll onto cardboard tubes, I break down their frames into component parts and place within the rolls. The studio clear I ready to spray two triangles one red, one blue, three points on the red, one on the blue. I overload the red, but the blue is good, a cheeky Yantra. I photograph, pack and ready them for their journey.

Oliver Marsden

2008 CHROMATIQUE FAS Contemporary London
OLIVER MARSDEN’S PAINTINGS: CHANGING BRAIN STATES

by Matthew Collings
Very strong illusion made out of simple means -- big square format with two sprayed dots -- like joke modern art painting – my daughter used to laugh at modern art and say you go to a museum and there’s a canvas with a dot in the middle – I could see what she meant – but here it was, this arresting visual effect in Oliver’s studio – just shows that an idea can be a simple one, and then it’s all in the carrying out – and like writing or music, you do it, and then you keep at it and it starts to be something.

What it becomes is then the new idea, even though on paper it would seem the same as the old one, or to an untrained eye it would still be a dot on a canvas – but in any case here are these sprayed dots arresting me – not that I am a neo hippie or loved up – Oliver’s explanations often have this feel – in any case the dots hover and seem to be forming themselves as you look – as you move in close one dot seems to be the after-image of the other one.

Dark red spray – orange ground -- it’s a fine line between working and not working -- the way the sprayed dots pulsate is deliberate not accidental – it seems simple and easy – but to get them to the point where they do pulsate takes a lot of work.

More paintings – a lot of them are one single radiating disc form – he says in 2005 he started working on sine waves (these are measurements, sounds can be broken up into them, they have different frequencies and amplitudes) – the related oil paintings he calls Harmonics – a disc radiating – every one is different but the format is the same.

He used to work in Damien Hirst’s studio (long hours, 8 – 6) but they’re not like Hirst’s dots – I always find those dot paintings attractive, and I marvel at the visual sophistication -- how does Hirst achieve it? -- I think it’s a mixture of his own sense of balance and the sense of balance the assistants have – he goes with the flow to some extent but in the end it’s his painting -- but in any case he really has got an eye – I never know what to make of the spin paintings though – they seem more like records of performances than something visual exactly.

Interestingly Oliver’s Harmonics are actually done using a spin method – his machine is a primitive electricity-powered homemade contraption using an office chair with a board attached – at a right-angle to the wall -- the canvas is attached to the board – the board spins -- Oliver holds the brush somewhere in the centre – he has to keep coming in and out and back and forth -- judging -- is the form right? – (Q: What’s your main rule? A: Never faf around) – he gets into the tiny nuances, yes, but mostly he makes big decisions -- it’s a process somewhere between sculpting and tuning.

When he investigates sine waves it’s to try and understand what’s happening in the Harmonics (he thinks of them as vibrations) – when he started painting them they were like perfect spheres lit from behind – like a pure form, almost – but now there’s a greater element of time (Q: What do you mean? A: Changeability).

The central point of the disc is the starting point – like striking a guitar string: the noise, and then the fade-off at the end.

He says the difference as he goes on and on making these paintings is that he’s trying to get more and more detail in – it seems only one thing at first, then you see more and more relationships. I can’t remember what the sprays are called – ah yes Liquemorphs – good name -- I think he calls the very big Harmonics Dubs and only the little ones Harmonics.

You have to keep hold of what is important – or what the hell, why not just let it drift? -- I’m not sure why he’s telling me that Kyma is Greek for “wave” – ah yes, a sort of 3-D Harmonic or Dub – Wow that Kyma looks complicated! He made it by some process of dragging a cut-out shape of wood through material called Jesmonite – the result is a disc just under a metre wide rippling with an undulating wave pattern – the hollows about three inches from the heights – but it looks flat at first – it’s almost funny when you realise how different the real object is from the illusion.

Sound -- colour -- light – coming into the studio, listening to music all day and feeling exhilarated by light -- he still doesn’t know what’s going in the FAS show – there’s a lot of work in the studio, and he’s making more all the time – maybe a lot of big Dubs in the downstairs bit – good, like a lot of resounding gongs maybe.

Interesting that at art school (Edinburgh) he dutifully did all the conservative things on the course: life drawing, nature drawing and life painting -- paid for the course by doing portraits -- loved learning everything -- in the free bits of the course he started doing abstract art, and he already knew that’s the direction he’d be going in -- for ten years he hasn’t known exactly what he’s doing all the time, but he’s always felt he was on the same path -- his studio is in Frampton-on-Severn -- remote beautiful hamlet with a river and a canal -- lives nearby and grew up not far away -- he’s lived in the USA, New Zealand and France -- he met his wife on an art residency in the USA – she was a student, making underpants out of mouse skin.

He wants people to involve themselves -- feel they’re creating the painting too – exploring – perceiving – there are optical effects and illusions, yes, but it’s not just that – there’s the illusion of the sphere yes, but you’re also seeing through the illusion – seeing just the raw elements – seeing how the effect is achieved.

He saw a statue of Buddha in Japan recently by Unkei (12th century) – it was alongside many other Buddhas, but looking at this one, he saw how much in another league it was -- how beautifully balanced – the way it achieved its aim -- projecting calm simply by that balance.

From his talk he seems giddy and floating but also serious, practical and thoughtful – he works hard all day and goes home at five to see his seven-months old son – in the mornings he looks after him too – he thinks about types of oil paints and acrylics and other materials all the time – he wants to investigate them – he thinks the answer to some philosophical puzzle he mentions is “love” – I laugh at his mixture of big, strong forearms and big, black, round, hollow ear rings.

He was turned on to science at Edinburgh by the writings of David Bohm, the scientist who discoursed with Khrishnamurti – trying to get quantum physics to fit into a spiritualist idea of reality -- it’s in one of these cosmic discussions about reality that they come up with divine love or unconditional love as the big answer.

In the studio working today, before I arrived, he listened to Nirvana, the Stone Roses and to monks chanting Om.

He says Om chanting is a way of changing brain states – ha ha, I think, anything is that – having a cup of tea, going to bed, etc – but I know that even cynicism can be measured – you can treat it as a material – channel it into creativity – I think Oliver’s inner being commands: CREATE BEAUTIFUL PAINTINGS – as opposed to the higher beings parodied by Sigmar Polke when Polke says: HIGHER BEINGS COMMAND: PAINT UPPER RIGHT CORNER BLACK – but of course Polke is only playing at parodying, since he really does often paint beautiful paintings, and there’s no cynical undermining of the beauty, except your knowledge of his other obviously cynical paintings -- like the HIGHER BEINGS COMMAND one -- or the ones where a lot of numbers and plus and minus signs all deliberately add up wrongly – in the end you think well, Polke’s an acidhead but also a thoughtful challenger of painting.

The light-artist, James Turrell, makes light substantial, whereas Oliver feels that with his own paintings he’s trying to dematerialise it.

Supposing you owned one, what would you be living with? Colour – a resonance – a note -- he only recently started to put his work into his own home – he’s got about five of them on the walls – a blue one – a rose one – a white one – a little light green one.

He used to paint them by hand without the spin machine – but that way you’re concentrating mostly on getting a round form – being motorised allows you to move to other levels, concentrate on all the different balances and relationships – (Q: “What are they, these relationships?” But there’s no definitive A) -- he feels it’s right when he’s got the balance but he’s not sure what the balance is, how it’s different from when it’s not right – each one is a challenge: to get it right, to commit to that form.

He painted a mid-green one with a white centre, which worked – it happened just like that, very quickly – so he stopped –– it can work quickly or you can lose it just as quickly.

2007 VISUAL HARMONICS FAS Contemporary London
PAINTING: THE OBJECT

by Damien Hirst
A friend at art school who made sculptures and collages, once remarked that he felt like a painter, only he didn’t use oil paints and canvas. Olly Marsden is an artist who seems to make sculptures of paintings or sculptural paintings.

I always wanted to be a painter much more than a sculptor or an artist, but I was overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of painting. I think it’s got something to do with the void of a blank canvas where anything and everything is possible beyond gravity, beyond life, in the realms of the imagination. Max Beckmann used to paint his canvases black to represent the void and everything he painted he saw as an object that he placed between himself and that void. Olly Marsden takes on gravity and movement and creates object / paintings that don’t quite sit happily as paintings or sculpture they are somehow both.

I believe that after Pollock created a distance between the brush and the canvas by flinging the paint, there was nowhere to go with painting…but people still go to St. Ives, still make action paintings. The urge to be a painter is still there even if the process of painting is meaningless, old fashioned. Today there are better ways for artists to communicate to an audience raised on television, advertising and information on a global level but painting is still important.

Olly Marsden picks up the challenge and makes a kind of science of painting and creates pictures that have nothing to do with Richter or Poons or Bridget Riley or Albers or even Op. They’re about the urge or the need to be a painter above and beyond the object of a painting. They are like sculptures of paintings.

They seem to suggest a sculptural idea of a painter. A scientific approach to painting. Art doesn’t purport to have all the answers neither do artists but the celebration of movement and the gravity defying monochromes seem to stop time and balance seductively for our pleasure.

I first studied art in Leeds from an emotional painterly perspective – ‘paint how you feel’ – painting as truth. But lies are a part of life, and painting like life has to take this on board if it’s worth doing. If you’re happy, you paint a happy yellow and red painting; if you’re depressed you paint a sombre brown and purple painting; of if you’re smart you give up painting and share your good feelings with friends, or when you’re down, cheer up and don’t drag people down to your level, don’t take anti-depressants – the difference between art and life. Olly manages to bring his paintings up to date with a mixture of gravitas and seduction created by a planetary circular motion it’s the way the planet spins in space the way the atoms move inside our bodies so as we look at them we can somehow feel them as well.

I believe painting and all art should be ultimately uplifting for a viewer. I love colour. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz. I hate taste – it’s acquired. I like the way Olly’s paintings look like they could have been made by a big machine – the machine being the artist in the future maybe.

I love the fact that in Olly’s paintings the angst is removed. The Van Gogh Horror of life is gone and replaced with a sense of limitless; fixed, motion. Somehow in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease; yet the colours and surfaces project so much joy it’s hard to feel it, but it’s there. The horror underlying everything. The horror that can overwhelm everything at any moment.

So is he a sculptor who wants to be a painter, or a cynical artist who thinks painting is now reduced to nothing more than a logo or angst scientist trying to make meaningful objects of contemplation. Art is about life – there isn’t anything else. As an artist you ultimately somehow make art for people who haven’t even been born yet, Olly Marsden’s paintings are what they are, perfect paintings, which feel absolutely right, right now in this ever-changing world.