ALL THESE OTHER ROOMS
Catalogue essay for artist Steven Rendall for the exhibition ‘All These Other Rooms’, presented by Niagara Galleries for Spring 1883, 2025.
black holes move at the speed of light
invisible, silent and supreme
with an appetite for galaxies
and atoms
and every one and every single thing in between
…
and there’s one on the wing now, staring right in at you
saying, ‘here is the ticket you’ve actually been waiting for…
there are worlds beyond these. there are worlds beyond these.
and I am the door, and I will hold your hand as you glide on through me.
you’re about to see it all.
—Jordan Prosser, ‘MH370’
///
Do they still provide bibles in hotel rooms? It’s an archaic practice: not only because our world is ever-more secular, but because it’s one where the horrors of the empty hotel room — the liminal non-space in which a lonely individual might yearn for some sage words — has been rendered full and thick by the mere presence of the smartphone. Here, content to fill the void is ever-present, ever-available. Who needs Jesus when you have TikTok?
And yet. One needs space in order to find revelation. To wrestle an angel, you need room to struggle. In a world of overwhelm, you need to carve out a gap. The transience of the hotel room, for example. The margins of the page. And here, in Steven Rendall’s new body of work, the grey ground.
This is new. The last time I worked with Steven, his paintings were dense, vibrating with subjects which jostled and spilled out, right to the edges of the canvas and beyond. Now, we have a radical shift, a focussing, a picking out of content. The grey functions both to foreground the figure, but also to obscure; they redact the background. These works are fast, furious, each executed in one day. Brush up, brush down: complete. At first glance, they might appear straightforward. Beware, though. When it comes to Steven’s work, it’s never even close to simple.
It’s a cold day in the studio. Shelves reach to the ceiling, packed with CRT monitors, stacked canvases and paint-splattered photocopies. The new works line the walls, balancing on shelves and other artworks. There are a number of large paintings leaning face-first against the wall. They skulk in the corner, ashamed. Steven won’t show them to me. ‘Something,’ he said, ‘went horribly wrong. So they got banished.’
This was early 2024. The big works were getting too complicated, rippling with too many components, too many elements, too many aspects. A change was needed. Steven turned to Philip Guston as a precedent; his ‘one-shot-paintings’ were executed in single sessions, still rippling with the memories of dreams. Steven began to paint on small canvases, boards, screens from televisions: anything that could be worked with at pace. These new works emerged, one, two, three a day, all hovering on this bed of grey nothing.
Art is always arguing its relationship with quantitative research, with rationality. It’s rigorous, we say, but it’s not science. It’s too tacit. Too felt. And yet, in this body of work, the scientific emerges as a method. The grey with which Steven paints out the backgrounds of the images is a single pigment — Langridge’s Titanium Grey. The manufacturer describes it as ‘a neutral priming ground.’ It tends, they write, ‘to have more clarity than mixed greys.’ It makes things tidy, clear. Seen. Steven describes the colour as a kind of control, as in a lab experiment. A common thread, a baseline. A way to link disparate outcomes. The terror of the void is tamed in these flat grounds that hold each figure.
Hence, too, the ongoing fascination with snooker, the flat, unreflective felt of the playing surface. It’s not the game, but the notion of surfaces: data occurring on the table, translated via the screen, whether a television or a phone.
These coloured grounds have been showing up in Steven’s practice for decades. There was the 2 x 2 metre cigarette butt he painted on the wall in a show in London in the 90s, in an abandoned shop in King’s Cross. The cigarette butt floated on a background of grey. There was a period of pink objects on a black background, though these were more strained, more heavily worked. These new paintings are doing on purpose what has long kept intruding unexpectedly.
There are, you might notice, a couple of full-bleed paintings. ‘Because,’ Steven notes, ‘I have to break the rule. So there’s some that don’t have any grey.’ The breaking of the rules is not merely acting out. It’s a way of slowing the looking, of complicating the structures that hold the work.
The visual quality of the figures retains Steven’s ongoing interest in translations between media, and in what is lost and gained with each shift. These figures come from advertisements, old photos, low-res emojis, stickers. They already suffer from the dissolution of the real into the limits of the digital. They’re then scanned and photographed, printed out on a cheap photocopier, gridded, painted. There is information drained out at every step. They are what Hito Steyerl calls ‘poor images’: liberated from context and quality and emancipated in ‘digital uncertainty, at the expense of [their] own substance.’ They are the ‘Wretched of the Screen’, pixellated trash. To paint them, to transcode their lack of resolution in oils, is to reify them, to return them to a state of importance, relevance, value. If poor images are ‘heavily compressed and travel quickly’, losing matter and gaining speed, what is it to fix them, to deeply materialise them in the slow static of a painting?
Even separated by the clear, grey ground, there is uncertainty in these figures; what data scientists call ‘lossy compression.’ The real sheds content at every stage. The threat remains that the fractures will become too great, that the information will become irrecoverable, irretrievable, a dissolution into abstraction, mere colour, paint and material.
The grid is still there, always, like an old friend, even when it is not needed. Steven points out a painting of a toilet paper roll. ‘Even I don’t need a grid to draw that,’ he says. ‘There’s not a lot of complications with a toilet paper roll. It’s just a cylinder. It’s not even a cylinder. It’s 2D. It’s a rectangle.’ And it’s not that he needs the grid to draw. He’s trained in drawing. He finds it tedious. The grid has come to represent something entirely beyond its use-function. Partly, it is an acknowledgment of the translation from drawing to paint. Its presence in this series, though, speaks to a deepening fascination with physics, with the attempt to express the edges of experience. According to cosmology, information cannot be destroyed, only changed — unless it passes into a black hole, at which point, who knows? The event horizon is the point of infinite destiny, the transfer into the deep unknown. From the outside, a figure approaching the singularity will appear to slow, never quite reaching it. The truth can only be known from within.
There are several whirlpools in these paintings, literally and in various guises — drills, mosquito coils, vortices. The grid produces perspective, correlations, proportions heading towards a vanishing point, a perspectival black hole. They look, in fact, like Penrose diagrams in physics. It was Penrose, significantly, who relied on diagrams, rather than equations, to express the structures of spacetime. Sometimes we need to think visually through a complex idea. Words and numbers are not enough.
There are several mirror balls in these works, typical objects of kitsch. For Steven, they are themselves grids. Each reflective surface splits the world into tone, squares reminiscent of pixels: consider Thomas Ruff’s degraded images of fighter jets and missiles, where the digital image approaches a kind of square pointillism. In the paintings, the spherical objects of the mirror balls are translated via grids onto the flat, non reflective static surface of the painting. They are, Steven says, ‘like some kind of balanced equation.’ He has five mirror balls in his house, though he doesn’t know why. ‘I don’t even like dancing.’
The mirror ball, it turns out, has a surprising history. The first one was constructed for the electrician’s union in the USA, for an end-of-year party in 1897. The design was patented in the early 20th century as a ‘myriad reflector.’ Grids reflecting multiple worlds. One of Steven’s friends said that the mirrorball summarises all of the other things in the show. An ellipsis. I think it’s more like a network, turning empty eyes onto all of the associations that become apparent over time: the painting of Melbourne’s 8/8/8 monument, another reflective ball with ties to the union movement. The gas hob, because it looks like a mirror ball. And too, because gas is made of billions of tiny single-celled creatures, diatoms, which are compressed over millennia and are turned into gas. Pressure, transformation. The centre of the gas hob, too, is a circle of darkness around which matter coalesces. A black hole.
We see here the type of peripheral logics that operate on Steven’s practice. He’s always been drawn to the weird, to horror and strangeness. And indeed, at first glance, attempting to make sense of the selection of subjects is doomed to fail. At first glance, you might see warships, submarines, flags and think: ah, we’re dealing with nationalism, with military might. Diagrams of vortices: an interest in the cosmological. Several pairs of women’s heels, snooker games: a certain performative, British masculinity, with its attendant fetishes. But how to account for the sticker from his daughter’s swim class? The toilet rolls, both new and used? The works with conglomerate embedded in them, or offcuts from Dungeons and Dragons figurines holding them instead of brackets? Bathrooms, a golden calf, JG Ballard’s house, St Martin’s college in 1968 — the logic here far from surface-level.
In the studio, I rifle through a huge stack of photocopies, images upon images. I hold them up, one by one, and ask him to play a sort of artist’s dating game: swipe left for no, swipe right for yes, for ‘this could be a painting.’ The answers come immediately, but their rationale is withheld, inexpressible. The observer effect in physics means that outcomes change when looked at directly. So too, with these paintings. The relationships only emerge laterally, in the corners of the mind.
In various European folk horror traditions, there are creatures that cannot be seen except in peripheral vision. These are the logics that attend these new works: relationships whose meaning is constantly deferred. Things sneak up from the sidelines — an ibis and a hanging lamp, both from the Hotel Windsor, shuffling into view. Paintings predicting the site of their own future. Two paintings of bronze moulds, because, you see, a mould produces multiples. These associations are strafing, sidestepping. There’s a kind of haunted kid-logic here, paintings made so others have friends, have someone in the room who understands them.
This latter logic is present in the names of the works, too — the thing in the corner, Ship thing. A discussion of the eponymous John Carpenter film produces a wondrous phrase: ‘The point of The Thing is that there is no thing. It’s process. The whole thing in The Thing is that there is no thing.’ Look too close and the thing dissolves. These paintings are merely in states of becoming, of wanting, somehow. Steven feels, sometimes, like an attendant to a mysterious cosmic force, an Igor or Renfield, caught in servitude to the desires of animated artworks, crying out for company. Why the rocks in the middle of some paintings? ‘It wanted something in the middle.’ There is always some quality of the pagan in this work, of a dark animism.
‘They’re teaching me things’, says Steven, of the paintings. ‘About whether things are significant or not, whether they need repetition, where in the levels of things the connections are; whether they are obvious or subterranean.’
A black hole grows by accretion, by consuming matter. That matter becomes distorted as it crosses into its proximity; the black hole warps spacetime itself. Notions unfold, collapse, are crushed together. Physicist Neil Turok describes the black hole as being like a mirror, in that it contains both everything and nothing. We’re back at the mirror ball, the convex reflection of data, the inverse of the black hole, which is the concave consumption of it. Painting as a poetics of physics. Ideas gathering in the margins. All or nothing. Either way, the best way to see it is to let yourself suck it in.