Paul Norton @ Oriel Canfas, Canton

27Aug10

Cowboys and Indians - Paul Norton

Dancing on the Soul of Nature, the title of this show, sounds like it has come from an early science text book and in a way that fits. Much of Paul Norton’s work has the look of microscopy. There’s something pleasingly microbial about his images.

In many of his paintings and prints, you feel like you’re watching an experiment where fungus is growing in a lab. This may be partly down to the shape of the pieces – many are oval or circular. It’s easy to imagine you’re peering down a microscope or perhaps looking at a sample growing in a petri dish.

If you’ve ever studied bacteria growing – the fridge is a good place to start – you’ll be aware of the intricate patterns and delicate colours of some of nature’s most successful and overlooked work.

Norton is fascinated by naturally occurring patterns and found marks. If this makes his work sound whimsical, it’s because it’s driven by an almost innocent, childlike curiosity in discovering and revelling in the simple shapes and patterns of things.

Norton sees the world in a grain of sand, as Blake would put it.

His work is often painstaking, there’s almost an element of obsession in his repetitive surfaces. You can sense the endless hours spent making these small dots, slowly filling the canvas with tiny repeated marks. It’s almost a meditative process, and in some ways perhaps that’s the response it might generate within the viewer.

Norton moves between different techniques and mediums with consummate ease – whether paint or hand coloured aquatint, there’s a unity to his vision and his technique.

The patterns are abstract, or at least abstracted, from observation. You’re never quite sure if you’re looking at leopard skin or tree bark. His world of curious blobs and weird Biomorphic forms can seem both microscopic and simultaneously astronomical. The worlds of cell and celestial co-exist happily in the same image. The parallels with Australian Aboriginal art are striking, not just the dot strewn surfaces, but the attempt to connect with greater forces.

Among the most fascinating pieces are images like Mighty Oak, in which Norton introduces a twisting spiral-like form that dances out from the centre of the image, snaking and curling, growing larger as it moves towards the edges of the work. Maybe it’s a pattern of blood vessels, or perhaps we’re following the fractal course of the river of life. A bacteriological Mappa Mundi growing on blood agar.

This is the strength of his work, it can hint at so many layers of meaning without being slave to some conceptual framework that simply needs to be “got”, in the way you “get” a punch line or the answer to a riddle. It’s much more open ended than that. Norton’s work follows a more organic route. There’s a real sense of life, birth, growth, rust and decay all at the same time.

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 27.08.10)

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Tags: Art, Cantaon, Cardiff, Oriel canfas, painting, Paul Norton, review, Western Mail