exhibition

Lunar Caustic a new ship for Malcolm Lowry and other paintings By Colin Smith

12.Oct.08 - 30.Nov.08
Thu-Sun 11-6 or by appt

Gallery Primo Alonso
395-397 Hackney Road
London E2 8PP
020 7033 3678 / 07939 580 247
info@primoalonso.com
www.primoalonso.com
Tube Bethnal Green; BR Cambridge Heath, Hackney / Bethnal Green

Colin Smith’s paintings present a set of images, often of situations or scenes that bespeak of isolation. Silent figures found at possibly the wrong end of a conversation or in interrupted moments, anonymous unpeopled buildings or ships caught in the passage of time have an emotional resonance with the depictions of empty clothes that hang in unspecified spaces. This captured sense of the moment in itself, despite a tendency towards an existentialist alienation, becomes all the more poignant by describing actions and sensations that are implicit. An openness of interpretation avoids an overtly contrived narrative thereby allowing the nature of the painting to reveal itself more freely.
Here he achieves a stark lack of extraneous detail, found through an application of paint that is itself both rich and earthy. Solid layers of opaque colour partially hide high key hues and flat full areas vie with the occasional detail found, for instance, on a patterned dress. The direct physical nature of the paint’s application, its strong sense of surface and structure, along with the allusive nature of the imagery creates tension and a strangeness that accords with a counterbalance between palpable stillness and the imagined journey.


David Leeson 2008