Years of
Dust &
Dry
2013
Everything about this series spoke of process. Arranged so as to describe a kind of journey, from sparseness through to abundance, these artworks shifted from minimalist and monochromatic – with grain and tooth exposed – to complete, covered and heavily layered.
Cass was living in Brussels in 2011, when he started work on the exhibition. The city was the starting point for the series: the Jeu de Balle flea market, where vendors are mostly those contacted to pick up the leftovers of house clearances.
Since those first mornings spent in Brussels, at flea markets and in the city’s numerous antique and second hand shops – Petits Riens – Cass has aimed to push to the furthest extent the inclusion of found objects, and recycling more generally, within his practice. Throughout the creation of this exhibition Cass visited dozens of antique quarters in cities and towns around Europe: hunting down fairs, markets and brocantes.
Cass started this project painting upon simple planes: drawer-bases, boards, table-tops. But gradually began choosing increasingly more obscure items, and items of considerable age.
Each of the items on which Cass paints has endured a life that speaks of function, of use, of wear. See for example the pasted canvas scrolls that make Distance and Roll out the Ocean: these (now faded, discoloured and fragile) strips of hand-stenciled signage – once prominent on a coach face – revolved, rolled, and covered great distance, hour after hour, day after day for decades. Take the coffee grinders that make Five Lands, Five Lakes: basic and yet integral parts of daily rituals; likewise the printmakers' drawers, boxes, frames, jotters…
The opening Years of Dust & Dry artworks carry little or even no paint at all. James Scott Elliot’s Slate exhibits only light repetitive scratching. The final pair in the show, The Weight of Water, is the opposite. These paintings are heavy, entirely covered in layered oil paint. These are paintings in full colour, created (and kept) outdoors, strapped down, exposed.
The overriding point of these works concerns time and memory. Small snippets, memories, fragments of the everyday, of passing time. Cass intended for this series to read as “flickers” upon beaten planes. Planes of unknown – but definite – age.
Many works spoke of erosion. Cliff faces, coastal scenes: heavy, solid masses, the soon-victims of sea rise; battered much more than the simple function of a door or table.
Photography by Michael Wolchover & David Cass
Surface
2016
Surface was a collection of found-object based artworks celebrating recycling and repurposing: shown here in Gayfield Creative (a pop-up display in Edinburgh). Created using non-traditional methods and painted on a variety of surfaces, these repetitive and layered artworks are unified by their exclusive depiction of water. From heavily layered oil paintings created outdoors over several years, to miniature gouache artworks painted on matchboxes or drawers. These artworks speak of a circular economy: further enforced by layered, lapping, interwoven brushwork.
The exhibition featured both imagined imagery, and snapshots of water surveyed whilst travelling: many are abstracted visions of the English Channel – Mor breizh – that now so turbulent strip of water the artist must cross to reach France, Belgium, Spain and Italy, where materials and supports are sourced. From Paris’ plethora of antique shops to Brussels’ frequent flea-markets, everyday items are gathered and transformed in the studio. Many, then, are a homage to Europe: the union with which Cass is strongly bound.
These are artworks made from ordinary objects that speak of function and familiarity: tabletops, drawer bases, trunk lids, roadsigns, books, papers. Aged items and objects that describe a lifetime of use in their worn grains, now mirrored in the brushwork upon each piece, the obsessive documentation of a singular subject.
Surface was also the name given to a 2020 online presentation Cass produced in association with Art North magazine for Projectroom2020.
