Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Ucheldre Centre, Holyhead
7 January – 4 February
Reviewed by: Wanda Zyborska
Iwan Lewis’s confident and joyful use of paint and colour spills over into various styles and subject matter, but he seems most at home in the lush, flat images of his larger paintings. His principal concerns are colour and surface, with figure and ground given equal importance in the interplay between shiny plastic house paint, sometimes beautifully marbled and layered, and the drier, more painterly passages in oil. The colours are fresh clear pastels and browns, pale and translucent in Fat Albino and Dear Ophelia, vivid and glowing in Mr Fish and Death of Mr Toad. The thick paint is drawn into, giving a spontaneous appearance to the well-planned compositions.
He seems more tentative with subject matter that is closer to home – Welsh culture and the rural environment. The defiant and self-parodying Welcome to Wales shows women in Welsh costume (featuring everywhere in Wales at the moment) in a group with a bored prize bull and a sheep. The Welsh hats are lengthened, phallic and sword-like, as on the sheep/unicorn in Mam Môn. These smaller works, with dry paint thinly applied, are less exuberant than the canvases that deal with mythical images from Moby Dick or Arcadia, and hint at a growing awareness of issues of Welsh identity. It will be interesting to see if he continues to use pastiche and mythology in his mature work, or decides to express himself more directly.
Rebecca Gould’s most resolved piece, As Time Goes By, and the delicate line drawings associated with it, suggest a conflict between introspection and a desire for flamboyant display. She conceals a video of a child play-acting inside a kitsch dressing table with a bulging candy striped growth on one side; a pre-pubescent Pandora’s box. Both artists are still plumbing their childhood for material: Gould’s installations appropriating toys, fantasy props, and domestic detritus; Lewis’s ranging further, from classical themes to contemporary politics.
Writer detail:
Wanda Zyborska
zyborska@hotmail.com |
wandazyborska.wikispaces.com
Venue detail:
Ucheldre Centre
, Holyhead
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