Rubbernecking

About

New work by three inspirational British painters… Rubbernecking, the slang expression that describes the act of gawking at someone or something, particularly car crashes is not only a look-come-see inducement to the curious viewer but also refers to a tendency underscoring the work of these three artists, all of whom are concerned in some way with a tension between a cartoon graphic quality and the rough texture of impasto paint. Both Phillip Allen and Rose Wylie's practices span drawing and painting, where a subtle to-ing and fro-ing exists. Wylie uses these drawings directly as subject matter, enlarging her sketches into large paintings where figures float over flat lines made from scaling up lined paper. Her eclectic references range from footballers, to arthouse films, to hand painted roadside signs in Kent, the pastoral often standing alongside the disturbing and violent. Allen shows a group of paintings that lie on the slip road of his practice. Often bringing in figurative elements these paintings are unlike what we have come to expect from him. Jake Clark works from collaged photographs to build narratives from his reference material. He sticks old vinyl patterns onto his support and then buries them back into the painting via layers of paint in a reference to the interior of the buildings he depicts. Each of our three gawpers are concerned with new ways of applying paint to create personal and fresh images that crash with the faded Festival of Britain feeling that permeates the surfaces of their work creating a counter-intuitive, bang-up-to-date contemporary.