Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
St Paul's Gallery, Birmingham
14 February - 10 April
Reviewed by: Simon Webb
Photographic reality is a funny thing, and much of this impressive show of contemporary painters using photo-realist techniques manages to confuse it further. 'Blow Up' is a large show in Birmingham's only serious commercial gallery featuring some heavyweight contenders, among them Dan Hays, Paul Winstanley and Jason Brooks. The show spins off in various directions, including the edge of kitsch.
Brooks' work is difficult not to admire in its vertigo-inducing detail with every texture of skin, every nuance and hair painstakingly rendered. His use of narrow depth of field - pioneered by superrealist Chuck Close - is more technically impressive than his predecessor, revealing an acute interest in the subjects themselves rather than just the process of reproduction. Impressive too are the still lives of Neil Gall depicting plasticine, parcel tape and paper - the ephemeral beginnings of some unconcluded project. Masakatsu Kondo's large hallucinatory landscape paintings made from digitally altered photographs present unnerving, unreal and empty landscapes, painted like a dystopian Pissarro.
Also represented is one of the original seventies superrealist artists: John Salt's work that takes the battered cars and worn colours of America's suburbs as its subject still looks strong against the younger artists' work. However, some of the work does border on un-ironic kitsch. Italian artist Roberto Bernardi seems locked in a romanticised depiction of flowers and still life, while Clive Head and Raphaella Spence offer little more than a Constablesque (if very accurate) depiction of the landscape.
The best work such as Roland Hicks meditative series of light bulbs remain engaged in traditional painterly problems of surface and texture. If this exhibition asks anything as a whole then it is about the value of art, through deliberately banal subject matter, and the hours of labour in copying photographic sources to produce it.
Writer detail:
Simon Webb
Venue detail:
St Paul's Gallery
94-108 Northwood Street, BIRMINGHAM B3 1TH
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