ARTISTS TALKING

Despite the title of Liz Bailey’s exhibition, with its reference to Jack Kerouac’s book and ‘Beat’ bible of the same name, the roads here play second fiddle to the expansive luminous skies that dominate the picture planes of these wide-open landscape panoramas. Having said that, most of the scenes in these eighteen paintings in Bailey’s exhibition are either of roads or from roads that seem to anonymously thread their way through a succession of non-places, (a concept made popular by the French theorist, Marc Auge) either desert, plateau, estuarine or semi-industrial. All of these non-places share the banality of the in-between, the marginal, the liminal, and are redeemed only by the glories of those expansive skies.

The majority of Bailey’s oil paintings here are in the titular series ‘On the Road’, each of which is in a diminutive thirty-by-fifteen centimetres, stretched landscape format. These pristine, exquisitely painted images have a filmic quality about them, reminiscent of Wim Wenders’ cinematographic aesthetic. The empty scenes depicted in these intimate little works are places of transit, places that travellers traverse as part of that subliminal blur that skirts the corridor between departure and destination. There is nothing here that you would want to stop for. It is only Bailey’s subtle brushwork and colour tones in these photo-real paintings that seduce the viewer’s eye and coax a longer look. The crisp sensitivity to detail in these paintings seems to contradict the banality of the subject matter, giving them a piquant paradoxical edge.

Only a handful of British painters such as Mark Fairnington, Andrew Grassie, George Shaw and Tom Hackney keep that photo-real flag flying, inherited from the American ‘Super-Realists’ of the 1970s, among whose number, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Malcolm Morley and John Salt shone brightly. Liz Bailey’s exquisite ‘On the Road’ series can stand proudly within that tradition.