Charles Mason

1962, Exeter - 2013, London

Charles Mason, in his sculptures, deploys a deceptively minimal approach. Sculptural forms that are more usually found in public urban spaces are brought into the gallery. They resemble enclosures, handrails and barriers, structures to aid and guide to support and protect. Objects that should be defined by a proper form and a proper use, here, Mason lacquers, paints and covers in insulating tape giving them a faintly utopian modernist aura. They appear to imitate and propose memories of practical function, which immediately implicate the viewer but in this context are inappropriate. Instead the sculptures seem undergoing some physical torment of their own to even survive as sculptures They are secured, chained and in one case subjected to a blow - torch.

The sculptures question our own physical boundaries as a way of creating meaning and their boundary role as sculpture.