Jonathan O'Dea

By: Dr Julian Freeman

Analysis of ‘London is London, England is England’, exhibition of new art work by artist, Jonathan O’Dea

Perphery, perimeter. Gyratory. All imply limits. But, like Rules (another strange word) that were made to be broken, so boundaries were meant to be crossed, boxes worked outside, and envelopes extended. This has become second nature to Jonathan O’Dea. The business of boundaries has combined with time and place, with memory and nostalgia, to inform his work for some years now, but amongst the newest are some surprisingly idiomatic references to an era long before his birth. For example, it is both curious and disconcerting to discover that he is attracted to the see-saw teeth of a 1930s factory roof, sharp-edged against crepuscular grey, in very much the same way as I was fascinated by the same sight as a child, back in the time when dinosaurs walked the earth. In the words of a well-known phrase, “How did he do that?”

Just as interesting and entertaining is the fact that O’Dea rarely holds onto a theme for any length of time: he doesn’t really ‘do’ series, so that, amongst the push-me-pull-you sensations to which his work most frequently responds, that factory roof is a one-off, and so, it’s possible that, to some, his statements can appear fragmentary; perhaps incoherent.

That this isn’t the case ought to be at least partly intelligible. O’Dea’s work – it isn’t by any means all painting – is as much recognition as it is investigation, and in this exhibition we find him moving, as his statement suggests, in search of even more boundaries. These extremes are at once physical and abstract, and may perhaps refer to a London whose conceptual extent we may prefer not to know. In artistic terms, that metropolis is a centre in which financial and idealistic muscle are often made to cohabit, in situations that too often deny emotion, intuition, intelligence and sensibility. In such a conflict between Lucre and Nature, the green belt, the suburbs, the garden cities, and every other peripherally valuable asset outside the maw of the city, assume incalculable value. Ah, you may ask… but is it England? And if there is a true difference between London and its outlying areas, on what terms do we admit that condition, that situation? Indeed, is that state even singular?

I believe that Jonathan’s work addresses these issues in ways that only the beholder can truly intuit. The small green 30 cms untitled squares might be open to several interpretations, but that line of light, so redolent of a shaft of sunlit grass, contains strong echoes of the surprises we all enjoy when confronted with limitless Nature. It is entirely possible to enjoy those moments within the confines of a city garden, but perhaps O’Dea’s ideas here are to offer those events up as contrasts best felt when leaving the city behind, or, perhaps, before entering it.

Walthamstow is unique as a location for statements such as these. Quite aside from its nineteenth century associations with William Morris, its more recent positioning as one terminus for the Victoria line positions it as an extremity of sorts; and, because of the entirely schematic nature of the underground map itself, a diagrammatic full stop, whereas in fact it is nothing of the sort. To travel to it is to move beneath organic London; to go beyond it is to venture into a sometimes less than perfect hinterland, but a hinterland that, mirroring O’Dea’s Grey Area, emerges from uncertainty. In 2012, ideas about confluences, emergence and merging will take on a greater significance, as the area plays host to a temporary and shifting population, present for an ephemeral event, whose physical impact on the locale is already being felt. O’Dea’s work as it is gathered here represents a piquant moment, one capable of reflecting the longer shadows of a mid-century local past, intertwining these with the detritus of the capital, and inviting a measured response. Ladies and gentlemen, such commitment is rare, and I have great pleasure in commending this exhibition and its author, to you.