Graham Fletcher: Spirit Rooms II (2023)

Combining the familiar and the imagined, Graham Fletcher presents and explores the artifice of constructed spaces, languages of fragmented time and a mysterious discourse of cross-cultural, deliberately juxtaposed, relationships.

Delivered with a soft-dry brush, the viewer’s line-of-sight (and entrance into the narratives of the work) begins well forward of the painting itself. Fletcher then deliberately inverts the gaze straight onto the viewer: the objects function like sentinels as they look directly back.

The paintings are spirit rooms. Everything is orderly, there are sensations of unseen hands in which the objects of veneration – Van Gogh and Gauguin paintings, diverse tribal artefacts, modernist furniture, still-life vignettes, spaces within spaces – collectively convey the beliefs and values of the absent inhabitants. Reaching across time, animated as much by absence as by presence, narratives emerge about the observer and the observed, about what is the difference between artefacts and pop-culture objects? Considerable dialogues also develop about issues of cultural displacement, assimilation and the relentless homogenisation of culture(s) with and in these contradictions and contrasts.

Even-handed and generous, imbued with a soft inside light, using architecture as a motif of time and constructed taste, (reminiscent of the curated and assembled in the likes of Architectural Digest), Graham Fletcher powerfully posits that the spirit world is to be found where and how we live. And ultimately, in what we collect and value.