Untitled - Damien Meade

even, it appears, weather and shadow-casting light). But there is enough gnarly impasto
and formalism here to remind one that Allen is architecting this world rather than
rendering it, and the questions it engenders (as a title like Blunt Repetition might infer)
are ones of how and why, as a painter, one begins and continues. Lawrence Corby, in
stringing a pair of deflated, testicular, colour-coded balloons to the base of an abstraction
entitled Small victory, opens up nonfiguration to melancholic, near-teasing
storytelling, as one wonders what the painting might encode and how it might relate
to the title’s mix of triumphalism and letdown.
Or one might see Corby as opening a dialogue with the history of abstraction, and view
this show through the optic of a conversation with inescapable models, painting-asproblem:
with, elsewhere, the history of portraiture as a spotlight on selfhood, as when
Paul Housley strenuously, ambivalently grapples the weight of past painting in works
like Marble Eyed Portrait, with its modernist distortions, cliché-boho hirsuteness (and, it
seems, Picassoesque striped top), and expressionist facture. Housley’s paintings, for all
their apparent looseness, are tonally hyper-precise in their evocations of a contemporary
anxiety layered on top of historical ones. What we might do with the past, again, is
assayed by Meade, whose patinated busts don’t feel quite situated in the present moment
but are made present by being read slantwise; and by Tim Stoner’s orchestrations of
figures. Stoner’s semi-regimented dancers walk a knife-edge of signification, the activity
is at once leisured and lockstep in a manner that suggests a deep love of order in the
human organism, a fondness for falling into line that has historically had all kinds of
nefarious socio-political implications.
Accordingly, Stoner’s twirling assemblies sit in a kind of non-time that allows them to
figure a gone moment and a potentially present one simultaneously, and this kind of
doubled temporality, too, characterises much of From London, which repeatedly assumes
that whatever is painted now is in conversation with something made earlier. Corby
can designate a graphic, arrowlike structure as a Winter Landscape and we get to wander
in the gap between title and image, testing the validity of the inferred affect. Basualdo
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