- Venue
- Superclub
- Location
- Scotland
Now approaching its seventh month, Superclub has been carving out an appealing name for itself in the midst of Edinburgh’s artistic landscape. Brian Cheeswright’s solo show – the second in an ambitious summer programme of weekly changing exhibitions – presents a generous collection of new and older paintings which are framed by an infantile immediacy, grotesque humour and spirited characterisation. His body of work encloses a tendency to boil down his physical subject matter into congealed cross-sections through which we can glean glimpses of their curious ontological stories. By unfurling his peculiar fantasies of matter Cheeswright has composed a series of seductively misshapen relations, many of them masked in tribal veils of impasto application. He describes his process as ‘a pained, difficult birthing or a quick, satisfying discharge of restless energy. Retrieving matter from liquid chaos’.
Formal correspondences with Philip Guston can be felt in Cheeswright’s semi-representational, cartoon-like depictions and personal lexicon of pictorial emblems. One of his most recent paintings Headache (2011) is a touching portrait of conjoined heads, occupied in a symbiotic and – one suspects – cannibalistic engagement. In Goody Two Shoes (2010) a young girl maniacally bares her teeth and gazes through mottled eyes that are cradled within ghoulish sockets, while streaks of unmixed oil paint become the skeletal scaffolding of her impassioned face. In Not the Doctor (2008) Cheeswright again coaxes the protagonist’s bones to the surface of his skin, as though wheedling out a tapeworm, so that they are nestled on the same plane as delicately tended wisps of hair.
On one wall a pared coupling of figurative paintings lends a forlorn sensitivity and domestic sweetness to the otherwise untailored manner of arrangement. In the first a pair of legs are poised tentatively on a precarious branch. The second depicts a couple clinging together against a bleak painted milieu that has begun to dribble and despoil its ephemeral paper base. Elsewhere in a tiny adjoining room is a composition of noisily-coloured works on paper in which the artist’s perpetual re-staging of fractured and dismembered figures serves to project a luminous feast of refracted visions. Painted with a lyrical and morose simplicity, these works perfectly ensconce the marriage of comic violence and pedestrian magic that seems to be the nub of Cheeswright’s artistic exertions.
