SOFT PRESSING
Kyle Weise

Soft Pressing is a dynamic exhibition of recent works by Simon Degroot that use abstraction to engage with the urban environment, where lines and patterns waver between play and purpose, observation and action.

For many of these works, realised on both paper and canvas, ‘frottage’ is an important starting point. This modest and immediate technique transfers textured surfaces to paper via rubbing with graphite or charcoal. The textures of bricks, tread plates, breeze blocks, utility access covers and other details of streetscapes have been captured in this way to form a ground for the works, bringing the hidden textures of our surroundings into pictorial visibility. Frottage expresses a purposeful moment of direct and intimate contact with the spaces around us, alongside an openness to chance, with the captured textures being determined by unseen surface details, rather than the intention of the artist.

Degroot has previously used shapes drawn from the urban environment as the basis of works, digitally manipulating these before their translation onto canvas.[1] For the works here, using frottage, his contact with this urban context is more familiar, almost affectionate, as he captures the crevices and forms of these everyday, often ignored, surfaces. Public murals are an important aspect of Degroot’s work, painted onto facades and materials typical of streetscapes, including Besser Blocks (Flow Through, 2019), concrete slabs and formwork (Nundah Mural, 2015), and bricks, pipes and window frames (Puzzle Innovate Solve, 2019). Soft Pressing is almost the inverse of these public works, as Degroot uses frottage to distill the form from such surfaces, instead of covering them with paint, replicating and transposing what his work would usually cover. Both, however, are based on a tactile relationship to these spaces, and both are structured by existing built determinations: whether this is the size of a building wall or the pattern of a telecommunications pit lid.

In their writing on frottage, both Maya Pindyck and Margaret Iversen emphasise that this process suppresses personal expression. Instead, they argue, frottage opens itself to contingency and to a tactile engagement with the world that moves beyond intention.[2] Iversen presents an overview of various contemporary artists who use frottage in distinct ways, both materially and conceptually. Despite the differences, a connecting thread across these artists’ work can be discerned in the connections many of them make between frottage and memory. This isn’t necessarily the memory of the artist, but rather memories subsisting in the material world. Writing on Masao Okabe’s work, Iversen writes: “Etched into the surfaces of the city are indelible traces of the past which are revealed through the intimate process of frottage.”[3] Similarly, Degroot’s frottages bring to visuality a moment in the life of these urban surfaces. Marked by a multitude of forces, including weather, plants and humans, these objects and facades are not static or inert but, like all matter, ceaselessly changing within the flow of time, intersecting with humans but not determined by this.[4] Pindyck extends this idea further, suggesting that frottage is a collaboration with objects and is susceptible to their vitality. This is a perspective that opens itself to the agency of objects, as forces in the world not delimited by human intention or interaction. Jane Bennett, referenced by Pindyck, describes this as ‘thing-power.’

Inspired by an accumulation of debris in a gutter (pollen, a dead rat, a plastic glove, a bottle cap and a piece of wood), Bennett attempts to grapple with the shimmer of vitality in these discarded objects and their part in active assemblages that produce effects, both subtle and dramatic, in ways that exceed human contexts and meaning.[5] For Bennett, the human remains a part of the assemblage of things, but she emphasises that human agency is always “accompanied by a vast entourage of nonhumans.”[6] The human itself is enfolded into this concept and recognised as a material assemblage: a complex agglomeration of minerals, chemicals, and other organisms, ceaselessly flowing and combining in the formation of a ‘human.’[7] Bennett’s interest is not to displace the human but to democratise and expand the conception of the political, in which the human is understood as one (unexceptional) actor amongst many. Here the nonhuman multitude is no longer understood only from a human perspective (“misrecognized as context, constraint, or tool”)[8] but is recognised as having agency and as a temporal force in the world.