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Excerpt from the exhibition essay I want to make something I don't understand, by Sarah Lowndes.

The full text is included in the publication Four Exhibitions: October 2008 - August 2009

(click for larger images)

Asked why he often destroyed each morning the work of the previous day, Piet Mondrian replied, ‘I don’t want pictures.  I just want to find things out.’[i]  Mondrian’s rigorous consideration of how to ‘visualize clearly’ the relations that exist between things underpinned his progression towards the representations he called ‘abstract-real’.[ii]   His emphasis on a reductive vocabulary of forms as a means of accentuating relationships is also a central aspect of the works made by the Glasgow-based artist David Bellingham (b.1966). Bellingham, however, does not work in search of a conclusion – instead, he says, ‘I want to make something I don’t understand.’[iii]  He explains, ‘I think what I’m interested in is the active sense of proposition in Wittgenstein’s sense, of kicking an idea into play or igniting a debate’.[iv]  His work is assembled from the ‘spare parts’ of existence, represented as footnotes on culture, as for instance in Bus tickets for Piet Mondrian (1993), a pair of small tickets coloured in to resemble neo-plastic paintings.  Bellingham’s installations employ photographs, text and found and familiar objects such as fruit, rulers, stones and envelopes to make concise and often poetic observations on the condition of ‘being in the world.’ His work also circulates beyond the immediate audience through the prolific books, pamphlets, cards and other printed material he publishes under his imprint Wax366. Bellingham’s practice, as Pavel Buchler has observed, ‘tests, case by case, the conditions of art as a model of resistance to the numbing complexity of the rules of our engagement with the world and with one another.’[v]

Often Bellingham refers to objects and experiences that may be catalysts for the synaesthetic blurring of

senses, whereby sensations in one modality, such as hearing or reading a symbolic representation, such as a letter, number or word, produces sensations in another modality, such as colour.  This is the case in his many works using citrus fruit, such as two facing pages in his book Fresh Fruit and Tables (2008), one of which is printed with the legend  ‘FRUIT IN VARIOUS FLAVOURS’, the other ‘COLOURS IN VARIOUS FLAVOURS’.  The work from which the title of the exhibition at HICA is taken, 40w 60w 100w is a photograph of three fruits lying on a wet grey road.

Mondrian observed that, ‘Reducing natural colour to primary colour changes the most outward manifestation of colour back to the most inward.’[vi]  While Bellingham’s restricted palette signifies a continued homage to Mondrian, the method of articulation – as with the bus ticket – reveals a conflicted admiration.