Untitled - Damien Meade

A Thousand Miles from Home
From London is a sliding-tile game of an exhibition. However determinedly one might
arrange its aspects into some semblance of order, via some kind of presiding heuristic,
one or two works or one or two artists won’t fit. In art if not in puzzle-play, this is a
virtue; the show arrives not with a thesis but a network of partial interpretative routes.
For example, let’s start simply and say that these seven artists engage the broad issue of
figuration, and more precisely what it means to paint a human figure. That holds good
for five of the seven, and it’s a story we can begin to tell; a story, perhaps, about how
painting might now be double-purposed, drawing us in only to push us away.
So we might assume that Damien Meade’s paintings of cool and heavy portrait busts,
their faces turned askance and unreachable (because you can’t walk around a painting;
that’s their wry conceit), are based on sculpted models. Though we might also wonder
if the model really exists, and if a real person modelled for it, and so a mise en abîme of
authentic selfhood opens up. We may see a life force glinting electrically through the
soft veils of Marianne Basualdo’s paint, and recognise that the lightly breathing, distantly
ominous figure we perceive there has only partly been built by her, the rest being
supplied by our active imaginations. We can appreciate that Milena Dragicevic is angling
together the syntaxes of abstraction and figuration to posit selfhood as an untranslatable,
utterly inward-facing enigma. These are paintings that consider portraiture as paring
back, as a dialogue with a viewer who must either deliver up something of themselves
in the services of completion, or recognise that the art is not a way of revealing inner
truths about an individual but a meditation on the dialogue between artist and viewer.
But then we might recommence with Dragicevic and follow another course: towards
painting as a point where abstraction and inferred narrative braid fruitfully together,
again with the viewer’s near-involuntary assistance. Where is the space, for example,
that Phillip Allen has been mapping in his paintings over the past decade? It feels
topographic, though it could easily be interiorised: it has depth and dimension (and
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