There’s a lot of fun to be had with Charles Avery’s huge, fictional, figurative drawings. His current one, more than 16 feet long, portrays the fantastical ‘Place de la Révolution’ – a bustling traffic circle, filled with people riding bicycles and rickshaws, but also pushing wheelbarrows, or children rolling hoops – all forms of revolution, geddit? Puns aside, the pleasure in this sort of narrative scene lies in examining particular details: the female tourists consulting a map, the local indigents on unicycles, the cafés and malls that line the periphery – all presented in Avery’s spikily languid style, with some aspects closely rendered and others left as deftly sketchy outlines.
Less obviously engaging is the broader context. All of Avery’s works are part of his epic, ongoing ‘The Islanders’ project – a quasi-anthropological, Gulliver-esque description of an imagined state, which also functions as an allegorical vehicle for various philosophical concepts to do with knowledge and representation.
So, there’s a rare animal called a ‘noumenon’ (a Kantian term for that which lies unknowably beyond the senses), while the Island’s capital is named ‘Onomatopoeia’, and so on – an accompanying map shows how it all fits together. Meanwhile, the central monument in ‘Place de la Révolution’ resembles a DNA double-helix, and there’s a Duchamp-referencing bicycle contraption – yet the symbolism simply feels rather empty: slightly forced and deeply whimsical.
In the basement space, a video projection of pulsating dots is better at conveying the phenomenological concepts – the dots’ apparently shifting directions being the mere product of perception. Overall, though, looking at Avery’s preliminary drawings, and his sculptures that reproduce pictoral elements, it’s hard to shake the feeling that he’s simply found a clever way of giving conceptual weight to what’s essentially a fairly traditional, undeniably appealing form of artistic practice.