[Cul-de-sac] A solo exhibition by Jake Clark

About

In Clark’s case, the Mallorca seaside madness was his home as a child. 

He gives an introspective emphasis to his depictions of both interior and exterior seaside architecture, situated in strange, car-focused, coastal edge peripheries, amongst lost cul-de-sacs, roadways, and other street furniture. Domestic interiority is given poignancy through the use of the domestic lino placed in collage on the surfaces of his works, and in other evidences of forgotten taste. 

Summoning playful colours and textures in sometimes wild combinations, in cascades of bright, toy-design humour . . . until they are compromised by severe noon  shadows, or the dark weather of shadowy, introspective nostalgia – with fear, regret and threat. Pigments that were once bright and optimistic are now subject to decay by ultra-violet light, and erosion by hard, wind driven rain and flung salt-water; the bright colours of daytime destroyed in a night time hell of monotonous municipal sodium street lights. Clark’s painterly context for this is the deliberate, grungy physical imperfectness of the canvas where his colours are situated.

But everything is subject to the universal justice of a cosmic comedown. 

This law, sadly, often requires that pleasure be paid back, and that positive meaning may come to be replaced with an absence . . . an absence that attracts an uncomfortable, ominous wind, coming in from afar, from colder parts.

The full text by Neal Brown comes with the fold out fully illustrated pamphlet that accompanies the show, and can be read on this link