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Paul Eachus,from top:
As though limits reveal, to..., 1981, Charcoal, graphite and wax on paper, 54.5 x 35 inches
Downstream, oil and wax on cancas,1982, 189 x 223.5
Drown II, 1978-9,
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Paul Eachus, from top:
Over there, 1979, oil and wax on canvas, 62 x 66 inches
Installation View, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1981
nstallation View, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1981,
In Order,Too and Even But So___________________________________________________________
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Paul Eachus,
Queensfield, 1979, oil and wax on canvas
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Paul Eachus/John Goto, Desert, 1982/83
from: "Panelworks", photograph, oil and wax and graphite on paper
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Paul Eachus/John Goto, from top:
Field of Entrapmemt, 1986,in:Blasphemies, Ecstasies, Cries,
Serpentine Gallery, 1989
Field of Entrapmemt, 1986, photo-painting
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Paul Eachus, from top:
Trans Chaosmos Facility, 2010,felt tip pen on paper
Assassinations[ Malcom X], 2014, felt tip pen and collage on paper
Trans Chaosmos Facility, 2010, felt tip pen and collage on paper
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Paul Eachus, Retorts That Came Too Late, 2002, C-type print mounted on aluminium, 125 x 171cm
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Paul Eachus, Provisional Events, Foreseen Errors, 2006, C-type print mounted on aluminium,
125 x 171cm
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Paul Eachus, Unsound Wave, 2007, C-type print diasec mounted,
200 x 180 cm
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Selected Work
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Paul Eachus’ work evolved from painting in the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties via a decade long successful collaboration with John Goto to the independent photographic pieces he exhibited internationally since 2000.
For this exhibition a selection of Eachus’ works from the last fifteen years attest to their currency. The large-scale diasec prints are clearly influenced by a painterly as much as a political discourse. He creates dystopian environments physically over a long time, from collecting and collating mundane materials, physically balancing them in the studio space and finally documenting them with the camera. Incongruously the highly tuned final work pays homage to anti-order. Eachus’ selections of textural chaos surprisingly align within the pictorial space. On the luscious surface of immersive scale diasec mounted photographs, the mise-en-scene of the artist’s studio/ mind/ archive becomes a quasi painting, where non-structures come to form patterns with the aid of accidental colour-fields. Eachus does not deny arranging the props, on the contrary his chaos structures are a conscious intervention to escape the order of the trained eye. For all their performativity and consideration they remain essentially sets for a pictorial discourse, temporal and transient.
In a secondary but equally important reading the chaos structures created for the photographs take on a social and architectural dimension. This is corroborated by the presence of sculptural and installation pieces in his practice such as Trans Chaosmos Facility. The sculptural works can be read as an ‘overspill’ from the two-dimensional surface. Chaos structures are part of a rapid expansion of cities, often associated with shantytowns and makeshift housing for the disadvantaged parts of society. Outside of any city planning temporary structures create shelter and subordinate economies, whilst remaining organic and impermanent. They are essential and precarious both in an architectural sense but also in a political sense. Eachus’ works astutely attests to social dystopia in a global context, while retaining a sense of controlled detachment through a residual painterly discourse.
The re-discovery of Paul Eachus’ work essentially highlights its currency and relevance today but also attest to its depth and density acquired over a long and rich practice since the late Seventies.
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