Luna Park

About

painting show curated by Jake Clark All of the paintings in Luna Park deal with the idea of constructing a fantasy space within the landscape - a quest for inventing a very particular world of scale and illusion. In ‘Travels in Hypereality' Umberto Eco writes about this as a fake landscape and the simulation of the real. Originally, Luna Parks, which included more iconic rides, were built in the 1900s and can be found in cities around the world. Using figures or the landscape within a deconstructed picture space creates a particular narrative, and collage, pattern and juxtaposition are all used to try and deal with questions of internal and external realities. Pattern and structure are often applied as part of the painting processes that get buried but seep through later stages of the making of the works, often appearing to be at loggerheads to the final images. Rosalind Davis and Jake Clark paint over found fabrics and vinyl — the flowery or ‘faked' patterns allude to the interior decoration of buildings represented. Due to the collage of incongruous scales, a sci-fi or psychological space is thrown open. Jeff Dennis floats images and objects over a bubble-scape background creating an organic structure for objects and images to slip in and out of. Robin Dixon applies similar clashes of scale - figures stand in a landscape of giant modernist structures. Günter Herbst's space is more bombastic showing a constructed social environment, rebuilt within the two dimensional surface using grids and textures to represent an urban collage of painting styles. Entanglement is a way of creating resistance in the picture-making process. You could say all five painters want to apply this to create multiple tensions and viewpoints in one space - a quest for the close up and the far away working simultaneously, trying to locate a mental space within the built environment. Lion and Lamb, 46 Fanshaw Street, Hoxton, London N1 6LG Open: Mon 1-11, Tues-Sat 12-11, Sun 12-10 Contact: Directors Peter A Jones: pj@turps.eclipse.co.uk Katrina Blannin: kitt.pet@googlemail.com Tel. 07866946631 www.lionandlambgallery.co.uk The Lion and Lamb is a unique opportunity for painters to curate painting shows: visual essays or a kind of platform where artists can examine current practices in painting, take works from their usual contexts and experiment with new juxtapositions.