About
Surface Image - Event presents painters working with emergent figuration whose primary engagement is with the act of painting, out of which a subject emerges; paintings where representation is an event rather than an illustration. The figural (opposed by Deleuze to the figurative) captures the âsensation' of the object, which to succeed must retain its indeterminacy and openness. Conceptually and formally, these five painters continually address the boundaries between abstraction and representation, materiality and illusion.
Nick Carrick's paintings are slippery explorations of the surface, weight, colour and texture of the act of painting. Usually his surfaces have a particular glowering presence, even as they represent a flower. His source material is diverse, and often obscure in the final result. His paintings seem like still life, an orchestration of elements on an always remindedly flat surface, the images stripped bare and freed from their referent. Exploiting chance from the outset in thin washes of lead primer, all the potential of incident is captured.
For Amy Moffat the image is chosen mainly as a tool to explore the medium of painting. She elaborates the visual associations in her subject matter via Google searches eg. she chose tents as a theme initially for their pictorial structure, but âtents' in Google brought up veils, the circus, hoods, the carnivalesque so inviting new motifs. The odd, elusive connections between the works thus build into a theatrical view, with props and characters that may or not come from the same play. A recent influence is the films of Michel Gondry, whose characters hover between reality and odd worlds of their own imagining.
Fionna Murray examines the role of place, separation and memory in her delicate renditions of uncertain, incomplete interior spaces, which suggest the familiar whilst retaining a distance that belongs to the world of the painting itself, a parallel place with its own accumulation of small truths, resemblances and fictions. Her recurring motifs of mirrors and oddments of furniture share the floor with almost abstract linear shapes. In her muted palette and untramelled rendering there is a slightly melancholic silence, and the presence of figures is undermined, cut through by a ceiling, door, or curtain - all is provisional in these quiet worlds.
Andy Putland's paintings filter and embellish images collected from observation and memory, drawing on an ever evolving collection of stories and places, heroes and anti-heroes, many of whom will be familiar to the viewer. Working loosely and spontaneously, he invites ideas to hover and morph on the canvas. This immediate style and openness of painting allows the possibility of accident to occur, while the irregular sense of composition and colour helps to isolate figures, objects, and shapes. Putland's paintings can be brutal and messy, but are invariably loaded with an undercurrent of black humour.
Ilona Szalay's technique speaks as much through what is left out or rubbed away as what is allowed to remain, often resulting in images that are enigmatic or even eerie. In her most recent paintings this extends to the visual content, reducing her human subjects to their (in)essential signifiers - clothing, badges, glasses, hats, which we may understand as sign of a reduced and shallow humanity (defined by its objects) and/or a commentary on the workings of representation itself. Always interested in structures and hierarchies, Szalay's imagery suggests a sexualized and politicised subtext of dominance and submission, the surveyors and the visually available.
