Rowena Hughes, Eddie Peake, Jean Charles de Quillacq

About

Flag-like, a red crest thrusting from green head and beak made of two triangles, the rooster on Kelloggs Corn Flakes is representative of so much more than the small feathered creature with a loud call. And cleaner too - there is something a little obscene about their fleshy red combs and flaccid wattles. Birds make great symbols; freedom, peace, and here - farm fresh vigour, a healthy diet and prompt morning wake up calls. Words will not do, we need a cock to immediately reveal the Sunshine that was missing from our morning. Eddie Peake's paintings, sculptures and prints interrogate the slippages in meaning that occur when things are made explicit. Apparently straightforward visual statements appear as both personal and too dubious to be taken either seriously or in jest. Appropriating mass-produced images by the simplest of gestures in high-octane colours, his works seem preoccupied by the autobiographical - the surface being a pretext for the acutely personal. Rowena Hughes applies geometric forms to found materials in a restrained play of evocatively stylish printed matter and mathematical absolutes. Recent work develops from a fascination with Penrose tiling patterns -a complex geometric tessellation that uses two diamond shapes that can extend into infinity without ever creating a regular, repeating, symmetrical pattern. For The Split Penrose Series, Hughes has developed a printing method that allows for chance compositions, querying the gap between the logical and the inadvertent. Jean Charles de Quillacq's approach is more reckless, his incongruous installations are blatant scams with depth and purpose. Reproduced 2D printed images of wooden surfaces (or veneers) are skewered onto semi-upturned office tables, which in turn become odd tableaux when displayed as a balancing act between a real object and an object of representation. This pared down aesthetic is either a ploy or a distraction, asking the viewer to suspend belief when in their presence.