Stephen Carter: Reading Between the Lines

READING BETWEEN THE LINES
A retrospective of paintings by Stephen Carter (b.1949)
focusing on the period of 1995-2011, curated by Sebastian Craig.

In 1995 Stephen Carter made his first newspaper painting; a one-to-one scale representation, using black rectangles and white gutters, of the structured layout of information on the page of a daily newspaper. This was to be the first work in a series which would occupy Carter’s practice for the next 5 years. The early paintings present different incarnations of the systematic graphic structure favoured by newspaper editors; they stop short of revealing the conceptual play between types of information and limit themselves to the purely spatial typologies of print upon pages. By the end of the 1990s Carter had introduced the 5-colour palette by which his painting at the turn of the millennium may be characterized. Following the same structural system as the earlier works, a colour code was now implemented: white to represent areas of editorial text, blue for editorial images, red for areas of advertising and yellow for what Carter calls narcissism (a self-referential editorial-cum-advertising text which it was not possible to classify definitively as either advertising or editorial), gutters between information fields were painted grey. The choice of these colours hints at one of Carter’s ongoing conceits - a feud between high and low culture. Displaying the colour palate of De Stijl, the paintings seem to advocate the austerity of a purely aesthetic endeavor, however each work represents a snap-shot of a cheap and disposable product of mass-culture which might be said to be a snap-shot, albeit fragmentary, of the culture itself at a given moment.