David Batchelor at Anthony Wilkinson at Sadlers Wells - Brief Article

Art in America, March, 2001 by Alex Coles

The blast of color coming from the column of 30-odd monochrome light boxes was unremitting. Viewed from any of the exhibition space's three floors (the column rose in a gap between the end of the flooring and an interior wall), David Batchelor's 33-foot-high Electric Colour Tower bathed the gallery in a pool of glowing light. Lest the work appear Minimalist, dozens of electric cables were left hanging down, each one buzzing as it imported electricity to its respective light box. These wires, along with the distressed look of the found boxes, gave the work its funk.

The boxes Batchelor uses are scavenged exit signs (an objet trouve from the industrial backyards of London), each with a slick sheet of colored Perspex covering its front. The light tubes inside the boxes make the color of the Perspex jump forward into the viewer's space. In this work an assortment of lipstick pinks rubbed up against lemon yellows and pale turquoises, different combinations of which were unsystematically repeated up and down the tower. Complementing the interplay of hue, there was also great variance in surface. Some of the Perspex sheets were quite translucent (on occasion even the light tube inside the box was visible). Others were relatively opaque, and so established a firmer plane that resisted the gaze. Besides the pitch of color, the objectness of the units was also affected by the nature of these plastic surfaces. When translucent, they felt lighter and, oddly enough, worked more three-dimensionally; when opaque, the tower was all surface. As in Donald Judd's work, Batchelor's electric color and synthetic surfaces are too abstracted to actually refer to a particular source. Which is not to say that their use of color and surface is not specific: the nuance in its pitching and weighting sees to that.

Besides its optical presence, which is so powerful as to have an instant physical effect on the viewer, Electric Colour Tower also had a significant art-historical impact which only revealed itself upon reflection. As in his earlier "Monochromobiles" (a series of found porters' trolleys with Perspex sheets inserted into them), Batchelor hero flipped our preconceptions of the historical avant-garde. In a sly moment, Duchamp once bemoaned of his archenemy in the stakes of the avant-garde: "take a migraine tablet for your Matisse." With Batchelor's powerfully retinal Electric Colour Tower, you needed an Advil for your readymade.