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Indepth Arts News: "Gastrophoria: Charlotte Brisland, Gary McDonald, Janice McNab, Victoria Morton, Neal Rock" 2006-01-18 until 2006-03-17 Pump House Gallery London, , UK United Kingdom
Gastrophoria is a group exhibition that reveals an obsession for paint's
tactile, synaesthetic and metaphorical qualities in relation to food as
demonstrated here by a selection of contemporary artists who take a greedy,
quasi-culinary pleasure in working with paint. Whether abstract or
representational, these works generate the desire to touch, taste and ingest
the inedible.
In his wall-based works, Neal Rock uses a surfeit of pigment infused
silicone in the manner of a pātissier - piping the mixture on like sticky
sweet icing. With a candy box palette of colours that are fondant one moment
and putrid the next his resulting gelatinous masses attract and repulse in
equal measure. Charlotte Brisland's visceral smears of impasto provoke
similarly ambiguous responses by exploring the boundaries between ugliness
and beauty. Her abstract compositions hint at recognisable forms that have
been liquefied, pushed and distorted through a process of synthetic
digestion.
Janice McNab chooses the empty plastic trays of chocolate boxes as her
subject. Rendered in rich creamy browns, these scaled-up realist paintings
conjure a lascivious and sublime landscape in a world of over-indulgence.
Gary McDonald's paintings create a sense of nostalgia, particularly in his
works of Tunnocks Tea Cakes, which fuse elements of Pop Art with an English
sensibility. Victoria Morton takes pleasure in expressionistic brushwork
and vivid colour fusing everyday life with the subconscious. Morton's
abstract realist painting Mouldy Bananas, Two Lemons and a Kiwi Fruit
explores the breakdown of pictorial convention, while asserting the
materiality and seductive potential of the medium.
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Food has long provided painters with a wealth of subject matter. The 17th
Century Dutch masters depicted lavish spreads of game and fish for
allegorical and symbolic purposes whilst for Chardin and Cezanne
arrangements of fruit proved the ideal model for their investigations into
perspective and form. When Goya and Soutine elected to paint slabs of raw
meat they did so with an expressionistic gusto that asserted the materiality
of paint and served as a poignant reminder of human corporeality. In the
late 1950s and 1960s the American Pop Artists James Rosenquist and Wayne
Thiebaud acknowledged the excesses of post-war production and consumption
with their deadpan images of junk food and confectionary.
