- Venue
- Wilkinson Gallery
- Location
- London
Phoebe Unwin: Between Memory and Observation
I have been mystified by the new type of painting I have been seeing for a while now. First at the Jerwood Contemporary Painters, 2010, last summer. Then in the Autumn, at Transition Gallery with a great show curated by Alli Sharma: Fade Away. Aptly subtitled: ‘painting between representation and abstraction’. And then last night at Wilkinson in Vyner Street where I saw the work of painter, Phoebe Unwin, for the first time.
What I see in all the work is a sort of anti-painting; often colourful, sometimes grim, featuring out-of-context motifs, small windows of intense drawing, elements of wall-paper type decoration, out-of-focus objects and figures; and, occasionally, paint [usually gloss] thrown smartly across the surface of the canvas; a definite blurring between reality – the object, the figure – decoration, and a sort of grimey, plasticine-coloured abstraction.
If I had not seen the other shows I wouldn’t have been open to Unwin’s work. Put crudely, there is an element of David Hockney – on largactil* – about them. More faded and, of course, more abstract, but still that wonderful awkwardness, the pause, the hesitation, the small steps you feel in the painters mind, as the brush moves across the canvas to capture the idea of an image, something just out of reach.
The Wilkinson gallery itself is stunning, literally a cathedral to art, with it’s vast white rooms, concrete floors and no other distractions. So for the art there is nowhere left to hide. Unwin’s paintings are not huge but they certainly hold their own.
In fact her paintings, captivating close-up, reveal more the further away you move from them. The work ‘Interior Man’ is a good example. Standing close the ashen, washed-out green and white surface is littered with decorative-looking shapes like painted number threes on the surface. There is something attractive about the colours and the design, one thinks of a child’s drawn-idea of clouds. One is charmed. Yet, this all changes as one steps back, and the partial image of a seated man is revealed. He is looking intensely out of the canvas at us the viewer, gesticulating with his left hand, pallid, ashen, drawn. Something uneasy between memory and observation is divulged at this distance, yet on closer inspection, concealed, unavailable, like a conjuring trick.
We see this again in: ‘Warm Change’ with its rainbow colours, repeated palm tree motif and white plastic chair. Your eye can’t help darting back and forth between object and motif, until finally, resting on the chair, you begin to make out the mere hint of a figure, a squashed, narled head, not just a chair with plastic legs but perhaps a whole seated figure. Who knows.
Your mind whirls with possibilities.
Before being drawn into the mass of pattern that is: ‘Three Bananas’. The intensity of black and cream hand-painted diamond motifs – just slightly off, like a Bridget Riley without measurements or a ruler – so you feel queasy looking at it, searching for those three red translucent arcs – the bananas of the piece.
I see the influence of a young David Hockney on Phoebe Unwin, especially looking at her earlier paintings from 2005 onwards. The over-large heads, the clumsy, unwieldy bodies created in with such beautifully crude marks, in fact, the marvellous awkwardness of it all. All this and more is present in Man made at Wilkinson.
My practice is drawing. Very rarely do I feel the inadequacy of drawing to fulfil my purpose, and to make its mark but, yesterday, seeing Unwin’s work made me long to pick up a paintbrush, and make free with one’s imagination in fat, dripping strokes. With no more thought in one’s mind than the fleeting, disappearing image, forever perched at the edge of one’s peripheral vision.
ends
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