Bambi meets Edvard Munch

Madeleine Strindberg’s taste in art is often skewed towards the ungainly. As somebody who has been to lots of exhibitions with her, I have found that I myself have become less impressed by elegant refinement and more susceptible to the charge often coded in the clumsy. Her own paintings in this show make the point.

Many of us would like to think that often we avoid the safe option in our lives but for Madeleine it seems to have become a kind of guiding principle in every area. As she tells us in the catalogue, a series of negative events culminated last summer in an eviction order on the studio, in which she has worked for almost twenty years. It is entirely characteristic of her that she managed ultimately to turn this situation to her advantage. Before she knew whether or not she could manage to get the order rescinded, she decided to work with the impending catastrophe. The work in this show deals both with the problems of her recent past and those of the paintings ‘left behind’, the ones, which had been, designated failures.

Jacques Derrida’s idea that there is no single truth embedded in any work is now widely accepted. He also thought that it was by studying the contradictions and the inconsistencies that lie buried beneath the surface that we get closest to the meaning(s). These paintings can be seen as palimpsests on the Derridean sense because not only has the original surface not been fully erased, but their essence is situated in the relationship between the ground (the remnants of the past) and the new marks which signify the present.

This means, perhaps, that these paintings do not have the freshness and sense of sureness, which has often distinguished her work of the past. There is a dialogue between the old and the new, which at times is jerky and discordant. Their second chance status is not denied even as it is transformed, and it is this that fuels the level of their impact in emotional terms.

There is an aura of tragedy. We gain a strong impression of the bleakness of the events, which have informed their genesis. At the same time however a vein of comic relief makes its presence felt, even if at times it verges on the painful. We are not sure, for example, whether the signs of sutures which recur are meant to be funny or not. In one painting there is an ox-blood colour and a quality of bragadaccio in the curly black marks, which reminded me of the film ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’: a fantasy of preposterous but enjoyable swagger.

The lesson that these brave and funny paintings taught me was that humour is redemptive. “Just look at yourself!’ she exhorts us in the title of the show. The wide-eyed creature in the title image that stares with rapture at his enlarged phallus - why is he being challenged to look at himself? Or that shivering mannikin, spewing out patches of black shit and curdled vomit, who is (s)he?. The bile may be literal but they also make us laugh. There is wildness and a freedom in these paintings, which seems to me to be valuable in the world today.