Peter Cresswell
 

Peter Cresswell has been working for many years on his new work including two large stereoscopic installations, and we are delighted to be able to exhibit it for the first time.  He investigates the contrast between physical, psychological and virtual realities using a combination of low-tech installation and digital photography.  As a painter and “Luddite by nature” Cresswell was drawn “kicking and screaming” into the world of digital imaging through his interest in the structure, representations and ambiguities of three-dimensional space.  In particular, he explores a sub-culture in perspective theory which has, since the Renaissance, questioned the conventions of perspective, a geometry which has generated order and impetus for centuries of optical invention.
 
Cresswell’s stereoscopic cabinets place human perception at the centre of a simple machine for seeing a space between two and three dimensions in photography and architecture, where a curious viewer is tricked into an actual sensing of deep space.  He experiments with ways in which the widow or frame dividing “real” and “virtual” worlds can be made to disappear, but states: “Illusion and art are uneasy bedfellows… Illusion tricks the mind while art must persuade.”
 
This work draws upon a spatial uncertainty which has troubled painters since Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael.  It modifies the fourteenth century perspective used in nineteenth century stereoscopes and peep-show boxes.  But Cresswell also reveals something of the seduction and artifice of contemporary techno-culture.

Peter Cresswell was born in 1937.  He currently lives and works in East Sussex.  He trained as a painter and attended Middlesborough College of Art, 1953 and the Royal Academy Schools, 1957.  His successful career teaching fine art culminated in his position as Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Goldsmiths College, London. 

Selected Exhibitions
Hatton Gallery, Newcastle
Young Contemporaries
Redfern Gallery, London
London Group
AIR Gallery, London
Photographers Gallery, London (Holography show)
Goldsmiths College, London
Lamont Gallery, London
Chisenhale Gallery, London

FIXED POSITIONS

In 1838 Francis Wheatstone invented the stereoscope: a frame presenting two nearly identical images set at right angles to two mirrors.  Seen through two openings set 65mm. apart the pictures coalesced to form a scene in three dimensions.  A miraculous deception, stereoscopy was photography’s principal exhibit until around 1910 when its place was taken by moving pictures.  But why take it up again a century later?  Because it is a procedural format, or one which has to be approached with deliberation.  You will remember that you take in the installations which characterise current art randomly.  A piece devised in these days for one of the big art festivals – a Biennale or a Documenta – might be made up of any number of mirrors, ropes and broken suitcases.  You drift through these kinds of presentations, taking in this and that: your own image in a context of obstacles.  You suspend judgement, because you can easily move on; and you are aware at the same time of the larger paradigm of current art which you can barely grasp.

One way out of this terra incognita is to call a halt.  These stereoscopic presentations by Peter Cresswell insist that you take up a position.  Strolling and remarking are not good enough, and certainly not if you want to experience the illusion – which is as compelling now as it ever was.  You come to a halt, situate yourself and grasp the scene.  Stereoscopy, by its very nature, asks you to analyse what you are seeing.  You pause for the sake of thought, and for a moment or two everything extraneous is excluded.  Stereoscopy is reflexive, introducing us to a means of representation.  Video, with which we are far more familiar now, is by contrast naturalistic, taking place as it does in real time.

It is interesting enough to be reminded of the conditions of vision, and it is intriguing too to be confronted by what looks like a kind of magic – self-sustained figures in space or figures unsupported by their shadows.  But at the same time we expect pictures to be about something else or to have meanings ready for disclosure.  Look deliberately for a meaning though and you might find yourself mistaken, for art’s preference seems to be to disclose by stealth.  Hence the concentration here on the procedures of seeing, for these procedures take up most of our attention leaving the unconscious to do its work undisturbed.  One of the pictures, for instance, is of plastic bags blowing in the wind and disappearing into the distance, and it may look like a demonstration of space above a rigidly defined modular surface.  The blown items though are a reminder of the delicacies of atmosphere.  They contrast with the grid and supplement the greenery beneath.  Likewise the seated figure who thinks in a markedly physical context of a rolling sea where gulls this time take on the aerial part.  Thus the images keep you steady for long enough to put words to things and to consider differences between a checkerboard, say, and the ocean.  This is how we make sense of the world, and taking up a fixed position helps that process.  Stereoscopy, yes, but that is just a beginning. 

IAN JEFFREY