Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Modern Art, London 27 October – 17 December
Reviewed by: Wil Bolton
These elegant enamel paintings derive from flash photographs of night-time woodland landscapes. Details of trees, bushes and foliage have been extracted from their photographic source, abstracted and transformed into a stark poetry of arabesques and twisted angular forms. Leafy greens, autumn browns and urban greys collide against a pitch-black ground. Occasional blood-red arcs puncture the void, and phosphorous splashes burn from the canvas.
Meticulously executed in household paint, these works have a slick industrial aesthetic and the look of camouflage, combined with an exquisite painterly touch. The colours are both natural and synthetic; the forms at once organic yet abstract. The image of the forest, redolent of the Romantic sublime, gothic tales and slasher horror movies, is combined with an insistence on the substance of the paint and the processes of painting. Flat and reflective, these works have a simulacral quality, as the sublimity of nature is mediated and transcended first through the camera lens and then through painting.
These canvases isolate shadowy glimpses of nature, dusky wooded corners suggestive of secrecy and danger. Time is arrested and extended, the moment rendered permanent, in an exploration of the chaotic and dynamic character of nature and humanity. Empty and dark, these haunting scenes reference death, loss and disappearance. They convey a sense of unease, paranoia and fear. Yet dread is coupled with exhilaration, horror with fascination, the abject with the sublime. The sinister, threatening presence of the void also holds a certain beauty and enchantment. These spectral and hallucinatory paintings glow with a poetic and nightmarish resonance, like afterimages burnt into the retina.
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WIL BOLTON
IS A WRITER.
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