About
Though appearing to be images of plant life, vegetation and coral organisms the ânon-mimetic' effect of Andy Harper's paintings is brought on by the elucidated tracing of the brush's interplay with the paint and the canvas. The brush is sometimes a brush, sometimes a homemade tool, or a stream of air from a compressor and, sometimes, just fingers. Harper's lexicon is a surfeit of what he has not painted, the trace of what has not occurred. Inscribed in transparent, watery ochres, greens and vivid strobes of bright spectrums are textures, veins and structures teeming with fecundity but virtual all the same. The imagery conflates with a type of animation, assimilation and actioning where the manipulation becomes its own narrative, rather than looking passively onto a window of the world reenacted.
Paul Johnson's intricately detailed collages are constructed of hand-coloured shapes. He scans the web for costumes, logos and other paraphernalia that hint at cult activity: secretive groups with their own belief systems. His banners and collages draw from newspaper coverage, and old-skool skateboard and speedway magazines. Using motifs such as badges, logos and iconography, he creates ideas of family and community. Johnson makes links between the skill and high-colour of banners and insignia used in political or faith-based marches and the crafts movement, folk art and outsider or visionary art. His interest is in the spiritual hidden beneath the veneer of the everyday.
Robert McNally's high definition drawings are a combination of dense miniaturisation, allegorical iconography and technical sophistication. They take their lead from a notion of make-believe and visual metaphor, depicting a series of tangential juxtapositions, weird characters, creatures and exterior/interior spaces; built around an inviolably precise articulation of minutiae. The drawings also play with notions of the absurd, the gothic, and the surreal, as seen through a world of artifice and assimilation. Yet, they articulate rich visual narratives, demonstrating complex conceptual themes transposed into visual reverie.
James Wright's intensely observed paintings on seasoned oak panels revisit the work of artists from the Early and High Renaissance and Flemish Schools, with particular interest in artists such as Rogier van der Weyden. Depictions such as The Deposition, The Passion, The Vanitas and The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian are recast in urban contemporary settings, and their narratives reconfigured through the accoutrements of inner-city street furniture such as graffiti, rubbish bags, cardboard boxes, traffic cones and unwanted possessions. Wright uses a vocabulary of symbols and motifs, often from History Painting but many of his own making to denote the themes of the original works he is revisiting.
