No Photography Allowed 2005

MARTIN YEOMAN
No Photography Allowed
Petley Fine Art, London

Foreword by Justine Hardy.

'There is absolutely no photography allowed in lap-dancing clubs and so, for many, this is an unseen world. Martin Yeoman wanted to re-interpret this and to take possession again of a combination of nudity and movement. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec caught it, up-lit and cast into pallidness by candle stage lights; Edgar Degas applied classicism to his almost voyeuristic way of seeing it; Walter Sickert trapped the detail of that wordless darkness, pushing boundaries so far that his posthumous DNA was tested for his Hyde-side of perhaps having been Jack the Ripper. How close did these artists comes to the line between what was and is acceptable and what is so harsh that it makes the viewer want to turn away? From this idea comes the question of why we seem to have reverted to a kind of prurience about nakedness?

Martin's journey into this concept culminates with this exhibition, but it began when he was nineteen among Toulouse-Lautrec's dancing girls, their show of flesh a potent moving thing rather than the static state of the life model. When he was at the Royal Academy in his early twenties Soho and Berwick Street were just around the corner. Martin began to play with the notion of live rather than life models, the female form in constant movement. The complication of the violence and protection racketeering that went with the strip clubs stopped the experiment.

Eleven years later Peter Stringfellow was all the hype with his new club, based on the American model of dancing girls with g-strings, a big addition however small and spangly they were. Dai Llewellyn wrote a piece in the Evening Standard's ES Magazine about going out in search of the real pre-g-string clubs, the places that had grown out of Sickert's sub-culture. Martin picked Brown's club in Hackney from those that Llewellyn recommended. To the artist it presented the opportunity to return to this idea of the living nude, the professional dancer, naked in form and presentation, without barriers.

"I went with my girlfriend Anna, and the power of walking into that club was huge. It was an early evening and the place was almost empty. All I could see was the back of a few men's heads leaning in over the edge of the stage, totally transfixed. Anna tried to encourage me to go to the front but, when the next girl came onto the stage, I just turned away, caught in that sense of doing something wrong"

Across eleven years Martin has moved from countless rapid sketches made at the club, into prints, then pastels, and small oils. The last stage was to work with individual dancers in context, under the leaching strobe lights of Browns, separating out glimpses of ideal line and form from what can often be hard-edged or even dulled by the girls' disassociation from the crowd. We see here what it was that Martin waited for: those first few minutes when a girl comes on, she has good music, she melts and reforms as a persona that turns the stage into a magnet for everyone in the room. Martin's ability to capture the enormity of the subject on a large scale allows us into that moment of electric connection when the paying crowd is mesmerized and, even in her naked state, the woman has all the power.'