The Islanders

I went to an exhibition this week, Charles Avery's The Islanders at the Parasol Unit, near Old Street, London. I must confess, I am not usually the type who frequents galleries but I knew I had to make an exception for this exhibition.

To begin with, my friend and I were almost thwarted by the labyrinthine arrangement of roads outside the tube station. We headed one way, then another, then we went back down into the tube and up through a different exit, all to no avail. After we had repeated this procedure two or three times in the rain, I decided to make a couple of calls and thanks to the twin miracles of mobile telephonia and the internet we were guided up City Road, past McDonalds, to a little, inconspicuous-looking warehouse with a sign reading:

"Buzz for entry"

Trepidation and feelings of acute embarrassment usually prevent me from pressing other people's buzzers but, wet and more than slightly annoyed at how long it had taken to find the place, I decided to throw caution to the wind... The door released itself and we walked in.

The gallery was a typical clinical, white framing device; a space to allow the functioning of whatever art was placed within it. Immediately, I was drawn to a sketch and a small block of text on the wall directly in front of me. The text was an accurate imitation of the first page of a traveller's log as he arrives in an alien land and the picture was of said traveller and the first human being he encounters there. Meanwhile, across the room there were maps and charts and a geographical globe of Avery's other world; I was hooked!

The exhibition is described on the press release as "a meditation on making art and the impossibility of finding truth" but I think that is a far too wordy explanation for a genius venture back into the realm of the sandpit. When I was a young I used to undertake a hundred million expeditions to other lands in my parents' box garden but, every year, I lost a little piece of the spirit of imagination which enabled me to make the journey, until, one day, I had to save up and buy a painfully expensive plane ticket to do exactly the same thing...

Now, the above is not to belittle Avery's art in the least, as, with his references to Wittgenstein and his obvious debt to, among others, Thomas Moore, this four year work is no exercise in simplicity or anti-intellectualism. Instead, Avery has fused his interests, both the facets of child and adult in his brain and created something truly magical. The artist is multi-skilled and talented, accomplished in geometry, in sculpture, in life drawing, travel writing and, in the case of 'The Eternity Box', the art of optical illusion, too; all of which he puts to use to build his world.

'The Islanders' is an exhibition that truly deserves the epithet "sublime" for its ability to both inspire and terrify other creative people in equal measure. On the one hand, when such a fully-realised work exists, you have to ask yourself what is the point of even attempting to create anything else ever again? It is no exageration to say that very little could come anywhere near the broad sweep of Avery’s ambition or the skill of his execution. The point of renaissance men and other men of genius however, is not to put other artists off pursuing their dreams but, instead, show them the very limits of the possible thus freeing up their minds to unleash their full faculties.

If you haven’t clocked on already I am heavily recommending that everyone who reads this blog takes a visit to see The Islanders before they vanish on the eighth of November.