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Maslen & Mehra’s new works place cut out hand painted letters, which spell out various words and phrases, in landscape settings. Lettering and landscape are united through the use of photography. These works can be seen as belonging to several different traditions, some recent but one at least very ancient. In terms of recent art one can refer them to several different sources. One, obviously, is earlier work made by the artists themselves, where they placed cut out metal images of human figures and animals in both urban and rural contexts. Another is the graffiti movement – subversive street art that first achieved gallery respectability in the 1970s, and which, after a period of neglect, has recently been enjoying a revival. Thirdly, there are the ‘truisms’ expressed in light-emitting diodes by Jenny Holzer, and fourthly, the brief texts and ephemeral landscape interventions of Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Ian Hamilton Finlay. These comparisons are enough to prove that this new series of works by Maslen & Mehra fits neatly into the mainstream of current artistic development. Perhaps the most relevant comparison is with some of the work done by Richard Long, who ‘moralizes’ – if one can put it that way – the situation of the human being within the context of nature and natural events. One thing that has never to my knowledge been said is that Long’s work represents an effort to import certain oriental, specifically Chinese, ideas into western avant-garde art. In Chinese painting, the landscape, not the human figure, has always been primary. It is man’s presence within nature that counts, not man as something separated from the surrounding context. Maslen & Mehra take Long’s attitudes a step further by combining image and inscription in a way long familiar from traditional Chinese ink-painting. Chinese ink-an-brush artists are able to do this because Chinese painting and Chinese writing use identical techniques, and because Chinese ideograms are only one step from fully developed pictures. Living in a western technological society, with a very different idea about the written text and what it does, Maslen & Mehra, have found a new and effective way of linking the written and the pictorial. These succinct, witty images make forceful points about man’s relationship with the fragile planet he inhabits. Edward Lucie-Smith
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