John Squire: Heat, Light, Death and Industry, Gallery Oldham, 7 July – 5 September 2009

We killed a little bit of time – including placing an ultimately winning bet on Kevin Pietersen to be top England batsman in the first Ashes test – before the gallery opened again at 10. It was nice to go back, because it’s an extremely attractive venue, with friendly staff on hand to help. The John Squire exhibition took up a fair bit of space, over two main rooms. The first room housed quite large metal box sculptures, in various states of being “unpacked”. There were just five in all, but in spite of the fact that the room was quite big, they filled it extremely well, I thought. Some are roughly the size of a person, so could almost be coffins, which is slightly eerie, but I suppose the fact that in this sense they are approximately “life-sized” makes them quite congenial and familiar.

Squire has clearly placed a great deal of attention on how this exhibition will look in the space itself. He has even produced two floor tiles out of metal which fit into the floor tiles of two of the rooms, so it is almost as if he is making the rooms his own.

The second room is filled with paintings, or if not paintings, metal pieces that hang on the walls. Again, presumably intentionally, they look extremely effective in this particular gallery. The colour schemes used – greys, and browns, and other metal-type colours – fit in very well with the gallery, which is modern looking, with a grey metal roof.

From the windows of the gallery, you can see the industrial landscape of Lancashire’s past, and the work, with its depiction of metal industry, fits in very well with this. And there is clearly a great deal of labour involved with many of the pieces. Inertia is the painting that faces you as you walk into the room. It is a large piece that, from a distance, looks like a Rothko. It is split in two, with the top half looking like a slightly different shade to the bottom. Go close up though, and you discover that the top half is not just a block of colour however, but a regular pattern of hundreds of open box-like shapes, drawn in pencil, which apparently took 6 months to produce! Heat Light, which is again a grid of shapes, must have been similarly laborious.

One of the themes running through the exhibition, which John talks about in the film that was showing, is that of decay. Many of the pieces are either rusty, or appear rusty. John was happy to leave the sculptures from the first room open to the elements beforehand. I suppose the idea is to show that the whole process is a natural one, and that the pieces themselves are organic, almost alive. One of the roofs of the gallery is covered with an orange moss, which once again serves as a great backdrop to the work. This was possibly by chance, but extremely lucky if it was!

I’m not totally sure if these works would look that great in a home. For one thing, you’d need a lot of space for some of them. I’ve said before how tedious I find it that many people today seem to choose paintings that “match the curtains”, but in the case of these paintings, I think if you wanted them to fit in, you’d have to buy the painting and then match the room to it. But in the context of a gallery, and this gallery in particular, I think these works look fantastic.

This is John’s first exhibition in a public gallery, and I think he can be extremely proud of himself. For me, the trip up was definitely worthwhile. Along with all the people I met – including Jah Scouse’s other mate, journalist and friend of the stars, Debbie Manley, who won an award for a story she broke about Dirty Den! – I had a great time, and really enjoyed the exhibition. It is starting to sound like a cliché, but if he hasn’t done before, Squire is DEFINITELY starting to shake off his Stone Roses shackles and legitimately become known as an artist in his own right, so much so that perhaps I won’t mention The Stone Roses at all if I review the next exhibition!

I think he’s almost reaching the pinnacle of his achievement as an artist. And the only thing I wonder in that case is maybe, just maybe, once he’s done that, he might think there’s not much more he can do with his art, and decide to pick up his old guitar again!….

This article first appeared in Issue 5 of Square Magazine

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