Stroma Funk, Charlie Adams’ first exhibition with Union Gallery, constitutes an intuitive response to a certain primordial ooze-like aesthetic, that of a fundamentally ancient cytoplasm, or the essential liquid substance of plant blood. This material trigger carries the potent charge of meaning and mystery throughout the exhibition, like a verdant tendril seeking to find a grip on the slippery surface of science and magic. The connective substrate of stroma evokes the hidden matrix of plant life, alien in its antiquity, and indivisible with primordial intelligence. While funk conjures a sense of deep-earth rhythms and pungently colourful cycles of life and death. Collectively, Stroma Funk pursues the inherent logic of the organism within the enigmatic framework of art and the supernatural.
The predilection of an artist towards a certain medium is a telling transmitter of creative intent, and forms a kind of genomic blueprint underpinning each artistic array. Beyond the literal experience of manipulated matter comes a speculative blossoming, a fecund field of mystic play, to be enjoyed by the viewer. Let’s consider that the cytoplasm of science, in this case, is one small ideological shift away from the ectoplasm of Victorian spiritualist mediums, both claiming to represent evidence of activity beyond the limits of human sensory verification. It is within these margins of entropy that we can locate Adams sensibility and then, as is our want, place it within the canon of Western artistic tradition.
What differentiates Adams painterly brushstrokes is the forward-facing trajectory of his surfaces. The glossy flat, layered, almost holographic imagery combined with the negative entropy of his sculptural objects collectively redirect scientific knowledge back towards abstraction, from whence it came. The intelligent visual sensations of Stroma Funk that we can see, remind us of the intelligent forces that we cannot. The gelatinous chartreuse and eco-delic colour of Adams’ pallet not only provide a visual kick you can almost taste, but seem to harbour vital coded information, at once familiar and elusive, about the works own composition.
Poetically, the creative process of the contemporary painter has much in common with organic growth structures. Stroma Funk unfurls with the deliberate procedural approach of the naturalist, asserting a visual taxonomy whilst allowing for the uncertainty of dreams. Adams proto-scientific interests belie preternatural undertones commonplace amongst ecologists and occultists alike. Such tenets recall the infinite innate wisdom of the primeval flora-sphere, now lost to the reckless pursuit of technological gain.
Hailing from Somerset and recently completing his Masters at the RCA, Adams retains the core impulse of his rural roots. The off-beat and joyously gelatinous works of Stroma Funk express a fascination for nature in the hedonistic vein of Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Guild of St George. In such bucolic Britannic tradition dwells a near spiritual belief in the power of plant-based opiates, to free the mind of modernist restraints, and to accept biological mysteries beyond the realm of verbal explanation.