If... Review, Buzz Magazine
If… Lesley
Guy
g39, Wyndham Arcade,
Cardiff
Until Sat 20
Feb
Consisting of 24 illustrations made on paper pulled
from a children’s colouring book, and stuck to the
wall with single pieces of Blu-Tack,
Lesley’s
Guy’s
Baby
Animals possesses a naivety that jars nicely
with its occasionally ominous content.
Taking pages from an animal colouring-in book and
overlaying them with dense pen and ink drawings,
Guy’s approach to image making is, she says,
concerned with “mythos; a way of knowing that is intuitive
and basic.” That’s not to say what she’s doing is all
unstructured automatic writing, however. The
defamiliarisation she enacts on the page is measured
and purposeful, and the exhibition seems to showcase
her progression through the process, from
Chimps (Without
Irony),
which has no real embellishment whatsoever, through
to Wild Boar
(Belle et la Bete), which has gothic touches and bears
barely any resemblance to its original.
The best of it is somewhere in between. Such pieces
are ambiguous, unsettling and indebted to
Gestalt
psychology, as
in Elephants
(Now Try These), Badgers (The
Manatou) and Orangutan (The Invisible
Man) which
both yield a number of different interpretations.
These are also the darker pieces in the set,
retaining parts of the children’s book, and
exaggerating the implied malevolence of her drawing.
The motifs that recur throughout her work seem to
reflect these attempts to uncover new ways of seeing:
there are eyes all over her work. Images are mirrored
and perspectives are distorted. In one piece, the
entire page has been covered with a drawing of a
scuba diver finding buried treasure.
It’s a striking series by an artist searching for new
perspectives and, in the process, attempting to
create a kind of symbiosis between the overlaid
sketch and the original page.