Untitled - Damien Meade

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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 <strong>Meade</strong>, 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 12
can crop in tightly on slurred, frontal faces and we think of particular types of photographic portraits: of mugshots. Allen posits his phantasmic landscapes against real ones; Housley has a larger history of art on his knowingly buckling shoulders... These artists - or their works, at least - are typically a thousand miles from home. Painting too is a long way down the road from where it began; and living practitioners can’t easily discard its starting point and interim stages. So each of these images inserts itself into a wider image-flow, and it is primarily when they do that their stories - or their sedulous muteness - are loosed. And if that’s true of their interaction with images that are not here, so it is in Murcia, with those that are: which is why this show is crisscrossed with conduits, discursive trajectories. These paintings are unstable, leaky things, nudged into gregariousness, jostling or whispering across the walls; waiting for our take, waiting on each other and our memories of the vast archives of art. They’ve found themselves on foreign shores, and they’re all - in one sense or another - from London. Naturally they’re going to be convivial: if not forever, then at least for the moment. Martin Herbert 13
Page 1: FROM LON DON
Page 7: Nueva pintura desde Londres Phillip
Page 10 and 11: pintura como un punto donde la abst
Page 13: A Thousand Miles from Home From Lon
Page 18: Phillip Allen Blunt Repetition (Cap
Page 22: Marianne Basualdo Sedna, 2011 Oil o
Page 26: Lawrence Corby Small victory, 2009
Page 30: Milena Dragicevic Supplicant 0404,
Page 34: Paul Housley Marble Eyed Portrait,
Page 38: Damien Meade Trail of Dead, 2011 Oi
Page 42: Tim Stoner Petit Bourgeois, 2011 oi
Page 45 and 46: Paul Housley (b.1964, Stalybridge,
Page 47: Agradecimientos/ Acknowledgements A
Page 50 and 51: Gutiérrez Mellado, 9 30008 Murcia,

Untitled - Damien Meade

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