KIT POULSON | ICE CREAM EMPIRE

About

For Poulson, painting combines a complex history of ideas with an ever-present, cheap and immediate sense of re-invention, a site of radical possibility. Made over the past two years, Poulson's new work contains references ranging from classic landscape painting to historic meditation chambers to the stage sets for pantomimes. Created through execution of separate painting episodes on the same canvas, the paintings are often visually complex, physically dynamic presences that at once suggest representational relationships — landscape, figure, interior, event — but become overloaded, almost collapsing under the abstract weight of paint itself. Fiction functions as an integral part of Poulson's practice and writing forms an equal output to painting. Poulson describes his writing as being constructed like an ice cream sundae and this metaphor can be extended to his paintings, which conjure up an alternate dimension — which he christened the Ice Cream Empire - where paint is agitated until it coalesces into almost animate characters. Ice cream acts as the ultimate metaphor for painting in Poulson's hands. The qualities of ice cream are the qualities of painting - baroque and democratic, ridiculous and desirable. Ice cream becomes both stuff and intelligence and in its image painting become a slow car crash of soft, sentient material, a multi-layered set of returns in which forms are buried and re-emerge to tease the edges of recognition then disappear back beneath the mutating, living surface. Kit Poulson was born in the same village as John Constable. His favourite ice cream is Neapolitan. With a wafer.