David Hepher : Recent Paintings Review

There is a definite underlying beauty to the grey tower blocks of David Hepher’s paintings that document his return to the Durrington Tower of Wansworth Road estate. The weathered, rain marked concrete of this structure takes on a silent but pleasing pattern of architecture that is enlivened with the bright graffiti colours. Using mixed media, indeed literal media, using concrete as a material on the canvas alongside paint and photography, Hepher’s new works boast tactility and beauty in a subject matter so readily associated with ugliness and failed socialism. Though, I admit, a large part of me winced at the subject matter on first encounters; the youthful allure of urban dismay, the street, the low-culture subject matter in high art; on further dialogue with the paintings, I warmed to their deeper impression of restful architectural observation. Rather than enforcing a brutalist edge, the use of concrete generates a tactility and presence to the work; the clever flow from photographic image to soft paint work relaxes the hard lines of the image. Repetition of soulless windows, rather than implying emptiness, creates a gentle pattern of shape that haze into another image or perspective. Even the graffiti scrawled over the canvases take on a muted character. This is not to say that Hepher sweetens the idea of this environment, instead, he seems to return to the building with a quiet understanding; an air of respect for one of the last few standing grey towers that represent poverty and the unaesthetic, but which house many hidden lives. The associations we have to this choice of subject matter are our own. While Hepher does randomly juxtapose the urban environment with romantic scenes of English countryside, which clash with the urban rise, they in fact further ground the authentic; the realistic rather than idealistic.