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PAUL LEWTHWAITE'S WHITEWALL - SOLO SHOW AT MILTON KEYNES CONTEMPORARY

by Robert Clark, artist and writer. 2007.

Paul Lewthwaite constructs sculptural intrigues from the most banal of suburban catalysts. He reveals the skeletal make-up of our manufactured world. His art adds up to a construction site of our everyday environment, a construction site that is often more resonant with suggestive charm than any envisioned architectural conclusion. He works from a perspective of enlivened displacement. This is the city as seen in uneasy close-up or vertiginous aerial perspectives. Milton Keynes, that living monument to 1960s urban optimism, is here itself monumentalised through a process of sculptural concentration.

The sculptural tradition of assembling cultural stratagems out of the mundane elements of our manufactured surroundings reaches back from the Pop Art that corresponded to Milton Keynes' historical foundation (Claes Oldenburg's giant electric plugs, Jasper Johns' meticulously recreated paint tins) through to the ironic mischief-making of early 20th century Dada (Kurt Schwitters' junkyard Merzbau, Marcel Duchamp's 'readymade' urinal). Lewthwaite absorbs this tradition and makes it his own by literally playing creative games with it. He sites a childhood spent playing around with plastic model kits, building sets and die-cast miniature cars as a formative artistic influence. Past work has variously resembled pile-ups of building blocks, immaculately boxed flat-packs, board game models, 3D puzzles, templates for some weird interior décor, distinctly modernised doll's houses. In a statement of typical self-questioning clarity the sculptor elucidates his ambitions, without at all giving the game away: 'I am using the language of model making, construction sets, toys, illustrations, referencing objects associated with representation, but without creating direct illustrations of buildings or layouts. A model exists to describe a real or imagined building or landscape etc, usually to scale and in miniature. A maquette is a sculptor's model. Am I making models or even maquettes?' As with any worthwhile artist, Lewthwaite here poses open-ended cultural questions and rigorously avoids the restrictive predictability of conclusive interpretations. His raw materials tend less towards the imposing sculptural weight of bronze and marble and more towards the DIY accessibility of plywood, MDF, cast resin, PVA. A closer look at the sculptural lead-up to the present commission will be instructive.

The 1999 commission for the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology was titled The Generation of Possibilities. A spray painted steel pairing of massive magnet forms, the piece seems the very embodiment of some kind of primal scientific force. The forms are tilted and held apart as if in a state of petrified attraction. As in all good sculpture, the spaces in between the solid elements are as essentially evocative as the sculpted forms themselves.

Ship for the Sinking (sculpture kit), from 2000 represents something of a formal and thematic breakthrough for Lewthwaite. A grey spray painted steel blow-up of a model making kit, the sculpture comes complete with a diagrammatic and precisely numbered set of instructions for building what appears to be a prototype boat. Here is the introduction of one of the most distinctive elements of Lewthwaite's subsequent art: the arrest of the form at its virtual planning stage, the enticement to the viewer to complete the work's creation through a process of projective imagination. The other aspect of the work's quality of formal and thematic suspense lies in the question of the boat's possible use. On the one hand it could be a innocent child's plaything. On the other hand the ship's steely greyness might well indicate some more warlike purpose. Then again, of course, both uses might be somewhat disturbingly simultaneously suggested.

A similar ambiguity of thematic intention is held in precise compositional balance in 2001's A Place of Blindness, a spray painted steel house with closed windows of blank varnished plywood. Standing at about three quarters of a metre high, the house invites playful entry for any visiting small child. Yet its self-enclosed bluntness of design suggests an almost autistic resistance to outside social engagement. Lewthwaite's ability to hold possible interpretations in tense and often precarious balance is one of his most distinctive and admirable skills. Simplistic readings are meticulously avoided, as are clichés of therapeutic self expression. Fragmented images are set together to provoke a kind of enchanted bemusement. We might not be able to define exactly and conclusively what is going on here, but whatever it might be certainly is resonant with the layered complexities of life as it is really lived. It is far from an easy creative feat to conjure such thematic collisions, such embodiments of psychological uncertainty and emotional ambivalence. Whether in fact to laugh or to cry? One is enticed into a state of thoroughly engaged if silent hesitancy.

A Collection of Fragments, 2006, is one of Lewthwaite's most visually poetic works. A series of five box frames contain cut-outs of marine plywood that bring to mind calligraphic emblems. Here Lewthwaite typically achieves enigmatic resonance with the amateurish tools of Sunday afternoon domestic indulgence: model making plywood and jig-saw. If this is calligraphy it is of a particularly cryptic kind, hinting at a language of amoebic pulsations, orgiastic dancing, the intense gestural improvisations of renowned abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock or Henri Michaux solidified into 3D wooden collage.

Lewthwaite's penchant for plans, maps and kits reached perhaps its most enticing level of impishness with his 2004 series Flat Pack Sculptures. Meticulously crafted timber boxes hold sets of cut-out MDF templates spray painted in various come-on colours like sunflower yellow and aquamarine blue. The precision with which the flat packs are created and encased leads one down the garden path into a belief in the possibility of their being assembled into objects of practical use. A closer inspection reveals their utilitarian absurdity. These templates for reverie reflect art's consuming uselessness when compared to the practical cause and effect stuff of the workaday world.

So we come to Paul Frank Lewthwaite's Whitewall installation in what he has called 'the wonderful play-set layout of Milton Keynes.' In so many ways the Milton Keynes shopping centre is a perfect setting for Lewthwaite's work. A compositional source for the work is road maps and aerial photographs taken from Google Earth. The grid-like plan of the new town city was strongly inspired by the Californian urban theorist Melvin M Webber whose ambition was the fabrication of what he termed a 'community without propinquity' in an age of motor cars and e-commerce. In so many ways his predictions have precisely materialised. Yet, of course, the Saturday morning shopping centre of Milton Keynes is still bustling with individuals who prefer or need to window shop in person on foot. After all Milton Keynes remains something of an architectural and social enigma in itself. Its very lack of character is often sited as its most distinctive characteristic. Even those who dismiss its lack of atmosphere admit there is no place quite like it. Although the new town optimism of the 1960s may have long ago vanished, there is no denying that such classics of town planning as central Manhattan or Paris were almost equally fabricated from a ground zero grid. Lewthwaite infiltrates this consumer environment with an aesthetic sense that has been fine tuned to the spellbinding and addictive languages of consumer commerce. With a history of contrasting thematic superimpositions, we do not expect him to come out either obviously for or against the Milton Keynes phenomenon. Rather he respectfully reflects the surroundings of his sculpture by a kind of architectural distillation. Tipped up grid-like forms are set against suggestions of the tools of the architectural and building trade. Forms are as bold and coloured as half glimpsed department store window displays. The compositional contrasting of organic softness and harsh geometries echo the landscape of the city.

Public Art, in Britain at least, is too often a case of either an irrelevantly imposed decoration (half unrecognisable modernist animals), sentimental nostalgia about the area's industrial heritage (heroic miners), an architectural afterthought (abstract nonentities), or iconic eye grabbing (almost anything as long as it's massive). Amidst this genre of bad art given ludicrously disproportionate public attention, the art of Paul Lewthwaite emerges as a breath of refreshing urban air. This is art based on a sensitive and thoroughly empathetic regard for its subject. It doesn't presume to be judgemental of its environment. Like a kind of 3D billboard of urban fragments it muses on the life of the city's inhabitants, the fact that the most apparently banal of settings still houses the struggles of humanity and the creative aspirations, sometimes admittedly frustrated and fraught with failure, to build an environment in which that humanity might be socially fulfilled. Above all Lewthwaite's art is life enhancing, and enhancing to the environs in which it is installed, through its disarming, creatively playful and culturally thoroughly mature innocence.