‘Shape Recognition’ at Eagle Gallery
David Webb, ‘Lemba Tree’ (2016), acrylic on panel, 34 x 30.5cm
Palimpsest, eh? Hard to spell; even harder to say, after the fourth visit to the punch bowl on New Year’s Eve; but very easy to love, as the countless Instagram snaps of peeling plaster and paint will testify: we’re all in thrall to a lovely bit of layering. Art historians on BBC4 sifting through X-rays of a masterpiece, searching for the clues to the painting’s provenance? Ghostly apparitions, caught by infra-red photography, floating up through the painted still life? Oooh, yes please!
The focus of this show- as its title implies- is intended to fall on how the exhibiting artists harness the power of shape. Instantloveland, however, can’t shake off the suspicion that it’s really all about the palimpsest: layering, and traces of fine adjustment, are everywhere; and as the press release points out, ‘everything external implicitly conceals an interior (which comes to light forcibly or feebly)’.
Dan Roach, ‘Parla’ (2014), mixed media, oil and wax on panel, 40.5 x 30.5cm
Dan Roach’s hexagonal forms hang seductively, and a little listlessly, in the realm between abstraction and figuration: necklace-like clusters on grounds reminiscent of cold, dirty marble, with hints of previous processes, previous marks, gathering in the two paintings’ peripheries. There is a certain cool detachment in operation here, an atmosphere of vanitas, drained of the narrative heat that might have come from overturned goblets, skulls or culled wildlife; whilst Terry Greene’s jostling, repeated shapes, meanwhile, take on the look and lustre of ancient wall tiles and rearranged fragments of some grander design, each piece of delicately crafted, cut-and-painted card on board looking as though it’s been pummelled by tropical rains and bleached by mediterranean sun. David Webb’s paintings push at the same playful possibilities that John McLean, Mali Morris and the late Geoff Rigden all approached, from different directions; but his distillation and refinement signal a break from the expansive, atmospheric legacy of American and Canadian abstraction that inspired them. Here, a dynamic spatial play is conjured out of the blocking-in and blocking-out of discrete colour areas in subtle or incongruous combinations of hues that often fly directly (and to Instantloveland’s eyes, refreshingly) in the face of good taste.
Terry Greene, ‘Untitled (050618)’ (2018), acrylic on paper, cut and pasted on canvas board, 30.5 x 25.5cm
All well and good: but the real issue here is whether all this hiding and revealing are just a sweet distraction to the eye, or if they reveal deeper processes at work in a painting’s structure and facture. Do the traces of buried painterly architectures add up to more than the sum of their mysterious parts?
Exhibition runs until January 25th 2019