To Paint is to Love Again
TOM BARNETT, NATHAN CASH DAVIDSON, BOBBY DOWLER, CHRISTOPHER GREEN, NICK JEFFREY, MARCUS KLEINFELD, SHAUN MCDOWELL, EDWARD WALLACE
Nathan Cash Davidson perceives in the paintwork of the old masters "secret doors and chains with locks", describing how in their works "the paint overlaps and maps out detail like unfolding hatches into an unknown and mystic environment". Engaging with Nathan's own paintings is like opening a door on a mysterious puzzle.The stories and titles are not there to explain the composition but rather act as a way for Nathan to create a world for the painting beyond its original life in the studio.When the painting begins there is no sense of where it will end - figures appear, a flower grows and a background of complex buildings spring up from Nathan's collected store of images and interests - a gathering of stories and an assembling of thoughts.
Tom Barnett has created his repertoire, not of images, nor symbols, nor themes, but of materials. Increasingly able to use these to his own ends, he is acquainting their particular qualities with the personal feelings and passing thoughts and emotions he seeks to express. In this way, he moves towards an art that is intensely private but equally universal.
Bobby Dowler exhibits the instinctive collaboration of the artist with his materials.These pieces foreground the relationship of the creative individual to the materials of his environment - he describes himself as guided “intuitively” to the detritus he incorporates into his compositions. The negotiation between artist and material is apparent in the strength, balance and tautness of these paintings.
Christopher Green characterises the compositional process as "like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle without the aid of a completed image from which to refer".These works are the products of schematised improvisation, and reflect the artist's commitment to the creation of art that realises the organic principle of patterned yet indeterminate growth.The tension of staged compositional elements and the dynamic interaction of colour, line and shape provides these pieces with their elemental drama.
Nick Jeffrey describes his work as a "progressive building up" - an accumulation of associative thoughts, emotions and impressions patterned in colours and textures. His tactile painting ap- proaches the sculptural in its physicality. Beginning with a single mark, he audaciously develops an interplay of shapes and attitudes that work collectively to bring into being a contoured emotional landscape on canvas.The cumulative effect of this compositional process is the creation of a powerful, startling expression of conflict.
Marcus Kleinfeld seeks to render the familiar unfamiliar by means of unflinching observance. These are contemplative paintings both in their subject matter and in our engagement with them, striving to remind us of the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known.This is a revelatory contemplation. In the juxtaposition of mundane and surreal in the two paintings exhibited here we are reacquianted with the viscera of quotidian experience, the latent violence of our lives as lived.
Shaun McDowell’s figurative paintings hold suffering and joy, agitation and peace, longing and satisfaction - the strange combined qualities of being alive. Paint is applied by hand and with oil stick rubbed, stubbed, smeared and spread across the board to create smooth areas of just-present colour, heavier built up passages and the punctuation of short, elegant marks. The strength of these paintings is their ability to appear abstract yet suggest quite precisely the feeling of the female form and record the experience of it.
Edward Wallace aims to expand the language of sculpture through the medium of painting by exploring the spatial realities that both are subject to. In several of his paintings the dominant figure is the triangle.These planes advance and retreat, extending from the canvas to entrap you in the confines of their angularity and at once become two-dimensional again. In these paintings Edward describes shapes with precision but behaves entirely intuitively towards what diagrammatic figure will finally be formed.These designs adhere to strict graphic conventions yet they take on a life of their own in the mind of the viewer. It is this mixture of technical rigour and instinct that means even in the most formal work the presence of this artist is never fully nullified from the canvas.
