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Betts Project

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Betts Project

BETTS PROJECT is a London based contemporary art gallery specialising in architecture. www.bettspro www.bettsproject.com

BETTS PROJECT seeks to enable a specialised and the wider public to find new ways to reflect on architecture through the exhibition and promotion of materials that have been part of the concept and process of architecture.

28/06/2023

Happy birtjday Alvaro Siza! 😇

02/06/2023

Happy collector 🥰

Peter Märkli
Language Drawing 2108, 2000–2014
Printed 2020
Pigment ink on Fabriano paper
Edition of 100

Available online or dm

05/05/2023

Sam Jacob: Blind Spots, 2017

It’s almost too perfect to resist: watercolours, landscape, Prince Charles.

Here we see a very particular vision of Britain, one whose subject, media and author are steeped in the the relationship of power to landscape, and to everything that landscape contains. The sentimental depiction, however, goes out of its way to hide these qualities: a hazy wash of nostalgia disguises the landscape. Especially when depicted by the heir to the throne, this biscuit-tin feeling for landscape is far from innocent. We have seen how destructive nostalgia for imagined pasts can be. Ill defined ‘pasts’ exclude the complexities and challenges of modernity and use false ideas of tradition and history to shape the future.

As in politics, so too in architecture. I imagine these interventions into (and/or deletions of) the Prince’s paintings as a form of architectural representation that intervenes in an idea of landscape. Blind spots and black holes puncture the scene creating visual interruptions that remain obscure: UFO‘s, monumental structures, or are they holes in the Princes’ visual field? Abstract rather than representational, they disallow the original vision, countering the sentimentality, the narrative and ideological ‘proposition’ they contain (which includes but is not limited to: a particular idea of nature, a false narrative of continuity and tradition, power ‘naturalised’ into the landscape, and so on).
– Sam Jacob, 2017

05/05/2023

Sam Jacob: Blind Spots, 2017

Architectural drawing is a strange and powerful tool. It is simultaneously a means of depiction and a way of constructing the world.

That’s why, beyond the conventions of practice, the politics of the architectural image remain so significant. The drawing is the world we construct: its own ideas of subject, its modes of representation and so on are hardwired into the worlds they depict and also become armatures of the world to come. Just as language constrains what it is possible to say, so too does the definition and nature of architectural drawings.

This is a small set of drawings from a wider exploration of the possibilities of digital culture on drawing. Often these are seamless collages made of multiple sources. But these are different. They are watercolours by Prince Charles that have had the most simple and blunt additions (or are those big black shapes erasures?).

It’s almost too perfect to resist: watercolours, landscape, Prince Charles.
– Sam Jacob, 2017

05/05/2023

Last two days to see Against Nature by Sam Jacob.

I’ll be a bit late today so opening 12:45 – 18:45
Saturday: 12 – 17:00

xx

03/05/2023

The series features geometric coloured elements added to antique prints of neolithic monumental structures. They accentuate the original’s composition of elements assembled and recast them as contemporary, as abstract ritual devices for non-specific enchantments and disenchantments.

Beyond use, liberated from meaning, yet possessing profound spatial and formal resonance, they recall Adolf Loos’ description of finding a mound in the woods: “We become serious and something in us says … This is architecture.”

Image 1
Sam Jacob
Ritual Litter (Lagan Stone Pl1), 2022
Acrylic on 1790 antique paper
18.5 x 26 cm

Image 2
Sam Jacob
Ritual Litter (Lagan Stone Pl2), 2022
Acrylic on 1790 antique paper
20.8 x 27.3 cm

Engraved by Thomas Vivares / Published by S. Hooper

02/05/2023

‘There’s something kind of endearing about this Sunday painter view of the lake district. Ernest effort, plain colour, and a heartfelt belief in the viability – even the veracity - of landscape painting. Here though the black rectangle obscures the main event – the actual raison d’etre of the painting. The view is redacted, the release of distance blocked in the mid distance. The way the painting works is inverted – No centre, all the edge. Frame rather than framed. Obliteration of the focus. Nothing where the something should be.’
– Sam Jacob, 2023

Sam Jacob
Against Nature (Hills), 2022
Oil on canvas
35.5 x 45.5 cm

Available online or DM

01/05/2023

Sam Jacob
Against Nature (Mountain Forest), 2022
Oil on canvas mounted on board
58 x 120 cm

‘Top left corner to middle centre. Top right corner to middle centre. Top centre to corners left and right. The shapes mark out a geometry of the frame. Each shape slotted within the scenography of the scenery. Peaks vs points. Slopes vs angles. Autumnal tones vs straight-from-the-tube black.
A widescreen landscape, like one of those old films whose aspect ratio can’t really fit on a TV. The real problem of format vs the world. Of even understanding where the edges of our vision are. A blurry corona where vision starts to merge with hearing, with that sensation cats get on their whiskers, that awareness of space around us, behind us.
What about depth? Have stage sets changed how we see space? Or do we make stage sets like that because that’s how we imagine the world to be, with us always in the front row? Spectators of landscape, never quite in it? Pictures frame us as much as we frame pictures of course. And what are we supposed to do with something as ridiculous as the Alps? Could we ever really be in the Alps?’
– Sam Jacob, 2023

Exhibition runs until Saturday 6th May

30/04/2023

‘Not geographic tropical. Not climatic tropical. Tropical like a spray-painted car bonnet, a beach towel. Not a place but a drink, a flavour. An imaginary of the western imagination. A construct of exoticism, rooted in colonialism, piratical fantasy, leisure, luxury, poverty. Let’s unravel that another time maybe. (Another lime maybe?) Maybe here it’s enough that the image dream is made incomplete. Tropical as an imaginary, impossible, incomplete place. Like when dreams have blank spaces where subconscious fails to render detail.
Three triangles three points across the top and bottom: corners and centre and the lines between them. Fixed and flat and blank, against the waves, the palm tree, the sunset. The sheer visual pleasures of the graduation, of colour spectra, or of ombres trigger little bursts of pleasure in our minds. These are the pleasures of the spray cans atomised splatter, of the splayed colour swatch. Signifiers of bounty and choice, signals of overabundance flooding us with optical serotonin.
The tropical-as-image contains this bounty. A mirage conjured by the pleasures of media, processes and techniques, a delirium of representation.’
– Sam Jacob, 2023

The series of Against Nature paintings depicts landscape as political fiction, as contested cultural terrain

Exhibition runs until Saturday 6th May

Image 1:
Sam Jacob
Against Nature (Tropical Sea), 2023
Oil on canvas
22 x 27 cm

Image 2:
Sam Jacob
Against Nature. (Beach), 2023
Oil on canvas
22 x 27 cm

25/04/2023

🤩EXHIBITION EXTENDED🤩
26 APRIL – 6 MAY 2023

SAM JACOB
Against Nature

Wednesday – Friday: 11am– 6pm
Saturday: 12 – 5pm

31/03/2023

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we, unfortunately, will be closed today and Saturday 1st April 2023

29/03/2023

The gallery will be closed for Easter, 6 – 12 April.
We will reopen on Thursday 13 April, 11 – 6 pm.

Image: Sam Jacob, Against Nature (River), 2022, oil on board, 36.6 x 47.5 cm

Available online or DM

28/03/2023

Thank you and for the review of our exhibition ‘Sam Jacob: Against Nature’ ! ✨✨✨

28/03/2023

A Perfect Zero

Stonehenge has been: a Roman / Buddist /Jewish Temple, it's been magically transported from Ireland by Merlin, a place of wild revelry and intimate tragedy, abandoned and discovered, a clock and a computer, a device and a place, a symbol of the counterculture and revolution as well as conservatism and nostalgia, a place where things end and others begin. It continually surfaces from its pre-history as though it were brand new.

Stonehenge's massive presence is in direct disproportion to the little we know about what it was supposed to be. This lopsided disparity liberates its form from any singular or particular content. Stonehenge becomes a sign without a meaning. Or so many possible meanings that the very idea of meaning collapses. Its blankness allows us to rapidly re-write its significance.Though it sits at the heart of British culture it is also like a compass at magnetic north the place where we lose our bearings. All the issues - like history, tradition and nature - which play such significance to the nation's psyche swirl around the ancient stones without settling.

Like a conspiracy theory, the desire to fix meaning delivers a cascade of alternatives. Narratives expand into its vacuum exponentially. The real archaeology of Stonehenge is not essentialist; it is an archaeology of speculation.

Stonehenge's emptiness of its own meaning turns it into a floating signifier that is both the start and end of history. Those massive, ancient stones perform a cultural backflip - a kind of historical prolapse where the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. Just like its circular plan, Stonehenge is a perfect zero, perpetually vacuous and sublime, forever prehistory and the future.

Sam Jacob
A Perfect Zero (Neon Stonehenge), 2023
Neon, acrylic
⌀ 120 cm x H 30 cm
Edition of 5 + 2APs

Available online or DM

23/03/2023

Sam Jacob
Against Nature (Lake), 2022
Oil on canvas
15.3 x 23.5 cm

[…]
The Against Nature series are made up of two elements, paintings bought from eBay and black geometric forms painted into them.
1. Sickly sweet descendants of the picturesque of various quality, age, style and provenance. These are used in as-found state, complete with their own damage, dirt and faults as if they themselves were landscapes.
2. Black forms derived from the geometry of the frame - halves, thirds, diagonals from corner to corner, ratio-ed rectangles.
The geometry of the shapes contrasts with the landscape, interrupting the fiction of the (mostly fictional) landscapes, interrupting the logic of one form of representation with another (modernity, abstraction etc against nostalgia, representation etc.)

The combination creates spatial and representational ambiguity. Their form is both part of the physical artefact of the painting-object as a 1:1 landscape itself, but also exist within the pictorial depiction of landscape. The flatness of the surface and depth of the representation are present simultaneously. They simultaneously read as things in the landscape and shapes on a canvas, as two different competing ‘realities’: The fact of the canvas, the fiction of the picture. As erasures / additions, as blankness / content, as voids / solids, as pictures / measurements, as something directly in front of you / something distant.

The series depicts landscape as political fiction, as contested cultural terrain.

23/03/2023

Sam Jacob
Against Nature (River Valley_1), 2022
Oil on canvas
51.5 x 62.5 cm

Available online or DM

[…]
The Against Nature series are made up of two elements, paintings bought from eBay and black geometric forms painted into them.
1. Sickly sweet descendants of the picturesque of various quality, age, style and provenance. These are used in as-found state, complete with their own damage, dirt and faults as if they themselves were landscapes.
2. Black forms derived from the geometry of the frame - halves, thirds, diagonals from corner to corner, ratio-ed rectangles.
The geometry of the shapes contrasts with the landscape, interrupting the fiction of the (mostly fictional) landscapes, interrupting the logic of one form of representation with another (modernity, abstraction etc against nostalgia, representation etc.)
[…]

The series depicts landscape as political fiction, as contested cultural terrain.

23/03/2023

Sam Jacob
Against Nature (River_5), 2022
Oil on canvas
20 x 25.5 cm

Available online or DM

[…]
Landscape is, of course, not nature but an ideological construct. And, like all ideologies, most pernicious when presenting itself as ‘natural’. Traditions of the picturesque, from Poussin to Bob Ross, from Capability Brown to the Chelsea Flower Show are political ideas about land. They frame ideas about ecology, labour and ownership through aesthetic languages. Images of landscape have transformed the earth itself (rivers dammed to form lakes, trees rearranged like still lives, villages wiped out in the name of ‘view’), and continue to frame contemporary debates around land use and sustainability. Attitudes to planning policy for example are influenced by hallucinationatory ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘beauty’ with their roots in cultural histories, images and forms of representation.

[…]
The series depicts landscape as political fiction, as contested cultural terrain.

23/03/2023

Sam Jacob
Against Nature (Tropical River), 2022
Oil on canvas
20.5 x 25.5 cm

Available online or DM

In the picturesque, languages of landscape (plants, trees, hills, lakes etc) and of images (framing, composition, surface etc) merge. The boundary between the physical world and the image world becomes porous: Picture is landscape and landscape is picture.

The series depicts landscape as political fiction, as contested cultural terrain.

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Thursday	11am - 6pm
Friday	11am - 6pm
Saturday	12pm - 5pm

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