Richard Wright- Wall Painting

When you enter a room housing one of his works, for a split second it seems empty. Then you might notice a small patch of coloured pattern near the floor, or running up one edge of a corner. Occasionally you won’t see it until you’ve turned around to leave. Reminiscent of sculpture or, perhaps more accurately, modest pieces of furniture or personal belongings, they occupy the room in a completely original way. Most ‘wall painters’ either use the room’s dominant wall as a substitute for the stretched canvas (Sol LeWitt, Simon Patterson or Jessica Diamond, for example), or they cover each wall from floor to ceiling and corner to corner (Robert Barry, Michael Craig-Martin or Martin Boyce). Essentially, the former strategy derives from the mural; the latter from wallpaper. Wright’s interventions tend to occupy very little of the total available wall space, often electing to work those parts of a gallery which no one in their right mind would choose, such as awkward thoroughfares outside the exhibition spaces themselves - stairwells, corridors, entrances.

When Wright does work in the gallery proper, he riffs off the eccentricities of the space and its door frames, skirting boards, alcoves, exit signs, pipes and shelving. Rooms with Rococo cornices don’t seem to bother him (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 1999); nor does beige floral embossed wallpaper (Belmont Hotel, Glasgow, 1995), stained concrete and scruffy windows (Luxembourg, 1998) or black rubber folding partitioning or views of obscene pink walls (Salon 3 in London’s Elephant and Castle shopping centre, 1998). Sometimes the relationship between Wright’s painting and a certain fixture gels to evoke a new figurative association. At TeclaSala in Barcelona in 1999 he painted four strips of what look like arabesque ironwork in blue and black, starting from just beneath a protruding pipe and ending just above the skirting board. The effect half-suggests a shower curtain, with the pipe standing in for the rail. The odd colour change from blue to black implies that the pipe is casting a slim area of shadow. By bringing the space’s anomalies into play, Wright pulls off a paticularly sly version of institutional critique. While most other interventions tend to require, ironically, the authority of the most immaculate white cubes, Wright’s additions bring out narratives of historical identity lurking beneath the matt emulsion of a given space.