As little as it needs as much as it can take
Thursday 10th May
Pre-preview critique: 6-7pm
Preview: 7pm-late
Bar + food + music
Exhibition continues:
Friday 11th – Sunday 13th May 12 – 6pm
Brandon, Durling and Lancaster push into zones where process leaves evidence of labour over time. Yet we also perceive a resistance to the illusion of completion, more concerned as they are with their final withdrawal, the work exposed to the precarious nature of its own survival. In this collection of painting and drawing, the descriptive tendency is questioned, forms are suggested, content is implied.
In Durling’s work, an intimacy prevails, irrespective of scale. A process of accumulation is in play, an obsessive tightening of surface, each mark in micro-reaction to its neighbour. Yet this repetition has the paradoxical effect of an exuberant loosening, especially when brushwork is introduced, into larger fields of resonance. We follow the trope of his organic forms into a realm of multiple associations.
In Lancaster’s paintings we are invited to read within inherited traditions. He questions his and our own expectation of inherent possibilities. Broad, oily brushstrokes take agitated pleasure in both implying and denying gestural mark making. Lancaster’s work floats over the Modernist project, with a playful eye to the exasperating complexities of the contemporary.
The possibilities of what can be articulated, and what can be fogged or de-articulated, is a rich territory. Brandon’s erased, layered paintings offer us the opportunity of precariously positioning ourselves. Working in series, he explores the limit of a simple idea with a subtlety that in no way diminishes the weight and seriousness of his ambition.
If this show has a defining principal it would be: as little as it needs, as much as it can take.
http://lloyddurling.blogspot.co.uk/
http://patrickbrandon.blogspot.co.uk/