David Thorpe Invests in a Conscious Deadness

In a recent text David Thorpe described the artist's aim using an extended metaphor of military defence strategy. For this show, 'The Colonists', the gallery's clean white rooms were cut up by intersecting mahogany screens, inset with thickly textured glass, which stood guard across its shopfront windows, obscuring visibility from the street.

The protected world within this ornamental fortress - itself embedded in the Karlsruhe landscape, with its surrounding forest of dark fir spires - is, however, intricate and generous. The fine detail of Thorpe's exquisitely constructed universe intimates love rather than the dull, earnest labour of some handmade figuration. The thickened surface of his collages militates against the easy consumption offered by Pop cultural images.

In Thorpe's earlier land- and cityscapes human scale is dwarfed by vast environment, implying an exaggeratedly diminished viewpoint. His third exhibition at Maureen Paley Interim Art, London in 2002 introduced new dimensions of sculpture and text into the work, but the current show marks a significant step in the resolution of Thorpe's project: from gazing up towards a world to being inside it.

There was a sense of physical immersion in the artist's world in 'The Colonists', but it did not derive from theatricality. Thorpe's dense configuration of objects, models, screens and pictures criss-crossed pathways and shifts in scale revealed worlds within worlds. The round frame of The Colonist (all works 2004), a window-view landscape of a fortified wooden building set in an ethereal forest, is accented by a curved oak bow, The Axe Cuts the Root, threaded with found trinkets, which in turn serves as a blueprint for the shallow arched geology of the dam in The Axe Laid on the Root. History is Nothing the World is Nothing Our Love Can Make us Clean is a snowscape built with a double depth of receding line and texture; from a topography of leather, bark and pressed flowers to a watercolour and tissue paper sky. The building in the picture is adorned with a cheap metal necklace that jars with the organic matter to charge the piece with a thrill of curious metaphysical transmutation. The installation is earthed by botanical drawings of armour-plated and star-petalled flowers: living specimens grown from the artist's vision.

Thorpe's work proposes a notion of cultivation with a corrupt etymology, one that yokes cult and culture to tangle conservatism and dark criticality. The portcullis-cum-trellises of the screened space mark out, with deliberate ambivalence, the artist's isolated dominion. The artist treads dangerously - and knowingly (titles include The White Brotherhood and The Kingdom of Seekers) - close to an analogy with the forest as protected domain: an archetypal primordial myth invoked by the Nazis with recourse to ancient Roman histories, or by 19th-century preachers believing in their divine right to the sequoia 'cathedrals' of the North American landscape.

There is an aggressive undertow in the work that reflects on Modernism's claim of apolitical autonomy. References to traditions of Western art are insistent and specific - tondo, triptych, plinth - while also being twisted to the triangles or pentangles of pagan symbolism. The geometric underpinning of his universe is quite distinct from early 20th-century attempts to discover the essence of pure shapes in the natural world, in Piet Mondrian's transition to abstraction, for example. Thorpe's artistic vision has begun to devour itself from within, growing mutated forms through excessive, enclosed self-sufficiency.

The romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich or Albert Bierstadt are often cited as referents for Thorpe's work. But where their contemporary Thomas Cole's The Cross in the Wilderness (1844) represents what Simon Schama has characterized as the 'depetrification' of the Christian symbol - green shoots sprouting from its stone to signify hope and resurrection - Thorpe has come to invest in a conscious deadness. His focus on natural landscapes, plants and trees is at productive odds with the layers of paper, dried vegetation, slate and opaque glass that have, in recent years, given his pictures an increasingly armoured, petrified feel.

Thorpe creates a world that is deliberately brittle, tinder dry. But its dead quality does not imply straightforward pessimism. The intricate craft of his making, coupled with this choice of materials, suggests the work as a kind of kindling. A triangular wood and glass lean-to construction at the centre of the show contains primitive stick-and-groove technology used to make fire. Its angular, mirrored shards dress it alternatively as a spacecraft. Like this model, Thorpe's configuration of works register a struggle to reconcile material existence with a drive towards transcendent obliteration; to catch, and be consumed by, fire.

_{Main image: David Thorpe, The Colonist, 2004, mixed media. Courtesy: the artist}