Paintings by Jon Ridge, Peter Suchin, and Chris Tosic
This exhibition presents the work of three artists for whom making abstract paintings is their primary concern. But despite this conscious commitment, the pieces by Peter Suchin and Jon Ridge included here skirt close to the edge of conventional depiction, while Chris Tosic’s geometric compositions – arguably the most abstract works on show – strangely mirror Thamesmead’s burgeoning Brutalist tower blocks and expansive concrete plazas. In a reversal of the conventional process of translating the natural and urban landscapes into abstract form, Material Base edges along the borderline between these two modes of address, encouraging the gallery’s Thamesmead location to be viewed as a kind of “interface” between two sharply-defined territories: the organic and the artificial, the traditional and the progressive, the ancient and the entirely new. In order to foreground these contrasts, Tosic’s uniformly-sized painted panels have been placed around the gallery in unorthodox arrangements of columns, “ladders” and grids. Further modest interventions may ensue.
Curated by Peter Suchin and Jon Ridge. Supported by Thamesmead Community Fund.
THAMESMEAD TEXAS
Unit 5, Starling Court, I Nest Way (Cygnet Square), Thamesmead, London, SE2 9FJ 1 – 23 December, 2023 Gallery open Fridays and Saturdays, 12 noon – 6pm, and by appointment.
For Summer-Autumn 2023 Thamesmead Texas takes up residence in Unit 5, 1 Nest Way, a vacant shop unit in Cygnet Square. The gallery is 8 minutes’ walk from Abbey Wood Underground station. Elizabeth Line trains run to Abbey Wood from central London approximately every 5 minutes (19 minutes’ journey time from Liverpool Street).
Jon Ridge Prior to completing a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in 2009, Jon Ridge worked as an advertising art director. He has contributed to numerous group shows and his paintings are held in many private collections, both in the UK and abroad. Among his recent exhibitions are Flirting with the Border Guards (Terrace, London, 2021, curated by JR), Time Being (Irving Contemporary, Oxford, 2021), and A Generous Space (Hastings Contemporary, 2021). In 2022 and 2023 Ridge also participated in two follow-up A Generous Space exhibitions, held at The New Gallery, Walsall and at Huddersfield Art Gallery respectively.
Peter Suchin is an artist, critic, lecturer, and curator. He has published over 350 reviews and essays in a wide range of publications and books, including Art & Design, Art Monthly, Art Press, Frieze and The Guardian, and his gallery texts include work for Annely Juda, Danielle Arnaud, Domo Baal, and Standpoint (all London). Solo exhibitions include Memory Objects (ETSU, Johnson City, USA, 2002), Compendiums and Palimpsests (T1+2 Artspace, London, 2003), and A Critical Contagion in the Quiet of the Night (& Model, Leeds, 2014). A survey of Suchin’s paintings will be held at Gaunston Studios, London, in November 2023.
Chris Tosic completed a postgraduate diploma in painting at the Slade School of Art in London in 1991. From 2000–2010, he was studio assistant to Dexter Dalwood, concurrently maintaining his own artistic practice and teaching part-time in various UK art schools in London and Leeds. Recent exhibitions to which he has contributed include Champs Noir (Terrace, London,2022), Painting in a Painting of Itself (Trace, Nottingham, 2022 – which he co-curated with Peter Suchin), Forces of the Small (Filet, London, 2023), and the Le Document Print Fair (Fitzrovia Gallery, London, 2023). Tosic also co-edits/designs Le Document, an online arts publication.
