ARTISTS TALKING

If you missed Guy Dale’s painting residency during the first week of August, don’t worry. You can watch it all again on his 1970s Hitachi TV, shedding its green light in the gallery. By ‘all’, I’m referring to the ‘processual’ approach to light and shade that Dale’s work embodies as subject matter. His is a self-contained world of canvases within canvases, a parallel place of doubling and repetition, surface and shadow. Here, paintings of blank canvases on stretchers engage you in a playful illusion; quite simply by making you look at something that isn’t really there. Yet the quiet, ivory images possess a virtually tactile three dimensionality – formed solely by gradations of shading that frame the original stretchers from within.

Dale’s illusionism keeps you dancing to and fro as you attempt to position yourself in the artist’s shoes to register where they were painted from, so that you can trick yourself with perspective, briefly believe in their substance. Dale even helpfully provides a little arrow-dotted site plan to indicate just where to stand to make the magic happen.

Another playful ruse: each painting was made within an hour of the day, uniquely capturing the fall of light and shadow at that hour and thereby distinguishing these paintings as products of a singularly natural, rhythmic event, irreproducible in time.

This is Creed-like minimalism – negative representation imbued with a subtle sense of humour. A miniaturist Wonderland which plays with the expectations of looking and the conventions of representation, creating a loop of improbability that unfurls as our gaze is directed from canvas to TV screen and back. The recorded image replays Dale’s resident mark-making, ghosting his presence in the gallery, just as his paintings ghost their materiality and the very stuff that they’re made from. It’s all enough to make you look twice.