Episode II: Home and Away, Contemporary Figurative Painting in Britain

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, August 2024

I: THEN AND NOW

The highlights reel of British painting rarely deviates from the vocabulary of figuration. One can hopscotch from the silky swish of van Dyck, Gainsborough and Reynolds to the fleshy funk of Moore and Spencer, then skip across the darkened throb channelled by the stars of the School of London and finish with a flourish provided by the cool yet erotic, simple yet sardonic beats of Hockney and Saville. All these artists have, in their most crucial and successful moments as painters, elevated the human figure to something other than its physical form. On their watch the body has signified an array of concerns predicated upon various tributaries of status and became a vehicle that emblematized a certain class or identity; certain patterns and paradigms of desire and their ever-shifting geology of being and becoming.

Nearly all these artists began – and, in many cases, continued – their careers in London. Yet nearly all were not born in London nor, indeed, were they born in Great Britain. Van Dyck was born in Antwerp; Francis Bacon was Irish; Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach were both born in Berlin. Hockney, like Moore, was a Yorkshireman. So, whilst the great triumph of British figurative painting was heralded in London’s art hotspots such as Kensington, Camden, The Royal College of Art or The Royal Academy, its germination often began in the quieter, bucolic countryside offered by counties such as Suffolk or Devon.

Home and Away – as both title and conceit; journey and oxymoron – is an Episode that embraces such historical dissonance – of source and celebration - even as the contemporary artists it explores betray an association of subject, mood, and design. Fourteen painters, most of whom now call London their home and have enjoyed formative experiences as artists in the British capital, have been brought together across two exhibition sites: Gallery 2 in Seoul and Matt Carey-Williams in London. A show – for me as curator and author – that sits in that space both home and away, disconnected physically yet personally connected emotionally and professionally for me. Many of the artists included in this exhibition, like so many generations before them who now so profoundly colour our understanding of ‘British art’, were born outside of London and the United Kingdom yet, today, their practices speak to a renewed interest in and examination of figurative painting in Britain. Painters born with Italian and Ghanian parentage; to German and Costa Rican parents or hail from Lebanon join those born in Chester, Colchester, Newcastle and, yes, even London to collectively paint a tapestry of experience that reflects what it means to live in Britain today. The exhibition thus serves a multilaminate of oppositions and congruities that, when contemplated thousands of miles away, further amplifies the issues that both entangle such a dazzling variegation of practice and politics yet lubricate a shared chorus of passion, presence, and protest.

II: CENTRE AND PERIPHERY

As I write this essay parts of Britain are burning. Several violent riots, instigated by numerous members of various far right factions, have resulted in hundreds of arrests across the country thus far. One of the more disgusting, barely believable images was of thugs deliberately burning down asylum hotels in Rotherham and Tamworth. A screaming mob literally smoking out frightened refugee families so that they could attack them for simply being different to them. When Yeats’ centre no longer holds, it is those on the periphery that experience the wildest tectonic shifts of logic, reason and care, and it is from this peripheral plane of anxiety and agitation – experiential and intellectual; political and racial – where much of the work in Home and Away reverberates.

Glen Pudvine, Europe Man, 2024, Oil and sand on linen, 90 x 80 cm (35 3/8 x 31 1/2 in)

Many people believe that the great contemporary political chasm that currently bifurcates Britain was exacerbated by – and remains exaggerated because of – Brexit. With a slim majority, Britain’s referendum held in June 2016 led to the country’s eventual exit from the European Union. The ramifications of that decision have served perplexity and dereliction to Britain’s economy and society in equal measure. Such a sharp political shift from community to isolation, accompanied by the multitude of antagonisms that flesh out that shift, has shaped many London-based artist’s appreciation of the figure. Glen Pudvine’s Europe Man (2024) sees his cheeky, almost self-satisfied self-portrait cling on to a compositional periphery of swirling clouds laid over an azure sky which are then punctuated with golden, sandy swathes of oil paint. These organic forms feel like islands seen from far above and Pudvine’s palette of blue and gold here chimes with the colours of the EU flag. However, inside the composition, marked out as a perfect circle, the centre does not hold but, rather, creates a galactic vortex aimed at sucking the artist back into the unknown of outer space. The title continues Pudvine’s interest in images that position his own likeness in art-historical or anthropological contexts: like Pioneer Man (2023) or Glen and Gibraltar I in Perugino (2024), Europe Man speaks to both past and present but, here, that conversation becomes a tense battle between known and unknown, with the artist – vulnerable yet resolute – positioned at the centre of that formal, painterly flux of matter and meaning.

Nour el Saleh, The rational planning of stillness, 2024, Oil on canvas, 120 x 110 cm (47 1/4 x 43 1/4 in)

Nour el Saleh’s haunting The rational planning of stillness (2024) is a painting that whispers the iconography of faerie tale, ancient myth and parable with a figurative language that silkily morphs between corporeal form and hieroglyph. The mood here is mystical and melancholic. Three women occupy the pictorial space: a cloaked figure seems to calibrate the size of a naked woman’s head below her with her long, spindly fingers as a hand thrusts forward a mask towards them both. Below, lying in a lap, another head stares up at the offered mask. Flesh, like fabric, seems to flow across the canvas in runny rivulets of oil - sagging yet dynamic – that simultaneously suggest both animation and atrophy which, in turn, sits in contradistinction to both the stillness and analysis indicated in the title. However, as with all myths where prudence and reason are often inverted to interrogate pillars of assumed truths, so it is here that Nour el Saleh manages to capture the quiet agony of inflection and contemplation shortly before the mask fully covers the central figure’s face, transforming mood and moment, shifting truth to fiction. Etiolation and emaciation are inevitably designed by the artist to speak not just to the cryptic mystery of her poetic narrative but to signify the struggle of herself as a Lebanese woman living in London. The outsider, told to be still, yet who remains adamantly not. In so doing she powerfully unmasks the distress of a viscous alterity, manufactured and propounded by one faction of society to mask and deny a marginalised minority.

Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy, Skin Deep, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm (47 1/4 x 35 3/8 in)

Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy’s Skin Deep (2024) neatly sums up the contest between a crumbling centre and the maelstrom of friction those on its edges experience as a result. The viewer is presented with a football ‘fan’s’ (perhaps ‘hooligan’ is a better word) tattooed back. Emblazoned at the centre is the heraldic motif of three lions that make up the England football team’s crest or badge. Above it ‘ENGLAND’ is scribed in dark and heavy letters across the figure’s shoulders. The cross of Saint George radiates out towards the neck, buttocks and two latissimus dorsi of the figure, tracing a path from tradition and even celebration (purloined from the Byzantine just as Pudvine’s trompe l’oeil hand is taken from the High Renaissance) to the pathetic, deplorable language of nationalism and racism. Numerous vignettes record the figure’s repeated affirmation that he is ‘ENGLISH born and bred’.

The capacity that sport should – and so often does – bring people together (written as the Olympics continues to bring such joy to so many people across the world) is now violated by the determination of this figure to permanently mark himself with the language and symbology of xenophobia and prejudice. Skin Deep thus speaks to the canon of identities, exposing the preposterous lengths certain people will go to for such marked self-determination even as it hijacks sports that intend to bring all cultures and peoples together as well as openly denigrate those who sit outside of their orbit of identification. This is a painting of skin – flimsy, vulnerable, easily shed – but it is far from deep. Guarnera-MacCarthy has created a surface of superficiality that interrogates rare, specific but all too often heard perspectives of Britishness that are (thankfully) anathema to the pride one ordinarily feels for one’s national football team during an international tournament. This man’s England is not my or Mattia’s home; it is a state made manifest by this figure-cum-wraith with perfunctory, empty tattoos, usually on display at ‘away’ games, that now shrill a violence and ignorance which currently plagues Britain, but which ultimately betrays the fragility and insipidity of the message and of the fatuous man whose paper-thin skin bears it.

III: GROUND AND FLUX

Joshua Raz, Decompression, 2024, Oil on canvas, 120 x 60 cm (47 1/4 x 23 5/8 in)

As the body is interrogated by symbol, glyph and language, so too is the ground energised yet infuriated into a flux that speaks to the divisions between familiarity and alienation; sanctity and peril and which continues the entanglement between notions of ‘home’ and ‘away’. In a Whistleresque Nocturne, two figures pass each other like ships in the night. Joshua Raz’s Decompression (2024) is dominated by an ornate arabesque of swirling smoke, emanating from the foregrounded figure’s hand closest to his smoking lips. Further into the composition walks his anonymous, temporary connection. Raz unveils a moment where two people cross paths and, just for a moment, share the same time and space, whilst all the while remaining unknown to one other. The artist thus delineates a split second where home becomes away and vice versa. The gentle flux of a propensity inexorably lost is more profoundly announced in the swells of smoke that circle up to a glittering, starry night sky, dazzling with flurries of pointillist marks that could be rain, snow, or falling ash. Raz’s figures do not betray any modelling in the usual sense but, rather, attain their physicality and psychological potency through the power and orchestration of pattern, much as his characterisation of the ground and ‘scape does. So it is that Raz’s decompression is here both the smoky exhalation of his protagonist combined with their ineluctable yet effortless embrace then detention by a seductive, all-consuming ground of choreographed colour and affiliation. Upheaval speaks slowly and delicately here – deep into the quite of the night – which, in turn, makes such exquisite whispers even more ominous, begging yet more information about the nature and intent of the decompression at play.

Andrew Maughan, Collapse, 2024, Oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm (31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in)

The escape from ‘home’ to ‘away’ can be facilitated and accelerated through several media but none more profoundly that film. Andrew Maughan’s Collapse (2024) continues Raz’s nexus between the perils that place inflicts on the figure and how the marrow of that estrangement and endangerment slowly but surely unfolds across the painted surface. Here, the viewer sits inside a car speeding through a distinctly American – and Western – landscape. Two eyes, literally cut out of the canvas, stare both forwards and backwards, arresting the viewer into a state of uncertainty: are we in the car voluntarily or not? The road is surrounded by (and ultimately blocked) by repoussoir of rocks that the longer you look at them, the fleshier and stranger they become. Fitting given that Maughan prepared these passages of terracotta rock with green, blue and purple underpainting, employing the painterly strategy of Lucian Freud who prepared his creamy, buttery flesh in that manner. So it is that the scene before us, so familiar that it could have been borrowed from any number of Hollywood movies, bounces between delight and dread. The only figure we feel is the vampiric reflection of nothingness that is his protagonist, ‘The Great Assassin’. The ground is, likewise, dominated by a geology that clearly alludes to the piles of bodies we see on the television every day in the many conflicts that haunt it. The collapse of which Maughan speaks is the collapse not just of reason but, most agonisingly, of hope. We journey with him and his masked assassin down a road to nowhere that offers no clarity of purpose or destination, just the frazzle of a journey into a conundrum no one can solve.

James Owens, I’m sorry, I have to be with my pigs, 2024, Oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm (23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in)

If Raz’s ground reverberates with the opulence of ornamentation and Maughan’s with an ideogrammatic simplicity of form then James Owens’ grounds are hybrids, offering both a curious candour whilst still allowing his composition to effloresce in bouquets of colour managed by a commanding yet often tremulous line. The interior flux of the figure is, again, heralded with klaxons of description and elaboration but is further amplified by the narrative – as both scheme and schema – that Owens deliberately employs. I’m sorry, I have to be with my pigs (2024) revels in its faux naïf scene: a young man in large white chemise, supported by a seated female figure, sits in an Edenic garden of flora and fauna glowing in amber and jade tones. In the background a large red tent draws thew viewer’s eye towards the upper left quadrant. Just below the tent one finds one of the pigs in question. The scene, redolent with possibility, could be read as two parting lovers; he is saying goodbye to her as she goes back to the circus tent and heads out of the village it had just entertained whilst he goes back to his farm to tend to his pigs. Or perhaps she is leaving him and taking her performing circus pig with her. The interpretation is, of course, malleable and does not represent any conclusion for the painting’s viewing. What matters here is the rendition of a temporary connection between two actors – one from home; the other away and vice versa – who gently speak to the whiffs of dislocation experienced by so many in Britain today and which, formally, at least, register themselves inside the gordian knots that make up the puzzle of place as well as the shapeshifting mosaic of colours that chameleonically disrupt the security of the figures before us. Nothing stays still in all three of these artists’ universes and yet the viewer cannot help but feel that action unfolding in slow motion with each motion becoming its own commotion, discombobulating and recalibrating the agency of figure, ground and their ultimate contest.

IV: MYTH AND MATTER

Figuration has always unravelled itself – as process, subject and object – as a series of leitmotifs, empowering the painter to explore not just what lies under the skin, but the texture of circumstances that enables that skin to be peeled back; perceived; penetrated. Just as the ground may throw the figure off into fugues of fluctuation and abstraction, so can temples of mythology – ancient and modern – create similar platforms upon which both the figure, and the subjects it dissects, are better interrogated.

Georg Wilson, Heavy Is This Head, 2024, Oil on linen, 90 x 70 cm (35 3/8 x 27 1/2 in)

Georg Wilson’s Heavy Is This Head (2024) knits together various streams of British mythology that relate to its countryside, in so doing asking important questions about historical ownership, land access and, ultimately, class structures. Wilson populates her paintings with a series of creatures; elfin-like, gender-fluid humanoids born of myth and lore that engage with their bucolic environment in charming yet testing ways. Here a rather winsome figure with botanical hands and feet looks out of the pictorial space as if in some discomfort. They are both blessed and burdened with a large headpiece fashioned, it seems, out of hedgerow. The figure is further weighed down by strands of green, weedy foliage slithering towards the headpiece like hungry spermatozoa. Perhaps the figure here speaks to the binary of germination and enervation; an antistrophe that colours several spheres of influence but which, here, is brought to life in the consciously cliché countryside of Avalon or Camelot, drawing the viewer back in to a conversation about identity and power. Wilson thus replaces the venerable energy of allegory and legend innate to mythology with a contemporary cross-examination of place, status and integrity. All of which is articulated by a whimsical figure that delights in its poetic inchoateness but which, by extension, fuels an uncertainty and anxiety that clearly speaks in the present tense.

Sophie Ruigrok, Salt Water, 2024, Oil on linen, 50 x 35 cm (19 3/4 x 13 3/4 in)

Wilson’s bittersweet whimsy is continued in Sophie Ruigrok’s work, however, where Wilson’s protagonists speak of home yet seem to hail from somewhere far away, Ruigrok’s figures are clearly identifiable as human yet seem suspended in the ache and solace of nowhere. Salt Water (2024) sees two heads floating in a glazy ground of golds and greens. Both figures have their eyes closed, quietly drifting in the water catching the sun’s rays which flicker in white striations across their faces. The gentle calm of the scene begins to crackle when we ask whether these heads are resting or, darkly, are not. Are these figures alive or are they floating in the sea, the tragic victims of a terrible wreck, perhaps? It is through the lens of mythology that one can swing the index of the image in different directions. Heads bobbing in water immediately recall the act and arc of the Baptism. However, such imagery – and especially in salt water as the artist is so keen to substantiate – sounds far graver notes when one thinks of all the refugees who have died whilst trying to cross the English Channel in small boats. A different type of narrative that, sadly, offers us a present-day pathos and bathos of mythic proportions.

History, culture, religion and politics all shade various streams of mythological signification. Much as Wilson’s pixies and Ruigrok’s abandoned heads serve to colour such discourse whilst remaining (trans)fixed in states of quiet angst, Ruby Dickson’s figures also press the flesh of the modern myth we now call ‘celebrity’. Unlike the delicate, mauve silence of Wilson and Ruigrok’s protagonists, Dickson’s figures trumpet their own starry arrival in dynamic canvases depicting celebrities.

Ruby Dickson, Kim Kardashian is seen out and about in Midtown October 07 2021 New York City, 2024, Oil on canvas, Total dimensions: 120 x 100 cm (47 1/4 x 39 3/8 in), panel 1: 40 x 100 cm (15 3/4 x 39 3/8 in), panel 2: 80 x 100 cm (31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in)

Dickson’s Kim Kardashian is seen out and about in Midtown, October 07 2021, New York City (2024) sees the reality TV star captured in a pink outfit holding a small, silver handbag, driving forward with a chromatic bang out of a picture plane of charcoal, washy diagonals. Society’s thirst for follies such as fashion, notoriety or mahatma take centre stage here but, as with Wilson and Ruigrok’s figures, Dickson’s figure betrays enough tergiversation to elevate and further problematize both her image and the indices that shape them. Ms. Kardashian, here, has been deliberately cropped by the artist; guillotined at the top, turning the celebrity into a modern-day Marie Antoinette: a mood continued by the fact of the painting being a diptych, of sorts. Dickson’s removal of her star’s face and her concomitant focus on merely the clothes that the celebrity wears issue the warning that all myths confess. That the skin of any text is only as deep as the cut you – as viewer, reader or believer – inflict upon it. The figure thus becomes the agent of their own demise, both assailant and victim. What matters is what the figure stands for in the panoply of illusion it inveighs against but must always accept.

V: STASIS AND SILENCE

There is disquiet in the quietness. Many of today’s figurative painters offer a velvety silence so pregnant with possibility that it hums with undeniable expectation, oscillating between erotic titillation and stupefying dread. Pei Wang, Chinese but now living and working in Barcelona, has made a body of work that, like Ruby Dickson, focuses in on the world of fashion. However, Wang’s descriptions of models in review images, wearing a designer’s clothes and laid out in order of a pending runway show, do not offer any pyrotechnics of colour or acclaim. Rather, their grainy application, trembling in a palette of silvery greys, locks the figures into a space that becomes its own dark mirage. A space that should identify and celebrate design but which, in Pei’s hands, becomes estranged, distant, even absurd. A similar palette is employed by Reuben Beren James in a series of works executed in ink suspended between layers of encaustic wax that depict abbreviations of the face and body or reveal an embrace between two figures on a bed, captured in various states of detail by the artist.

Pei Wang, Mute 67, 2024, Oil on linen, 80 x 40 cm (31 1/2 x 15 3/4 in)

Reuben Beren James, Untitled, 2024, Ink, paper and encaustic wax on 19mm wooden panel, 30 x 25 cm (11 3/4 x 9 7/8 in)

Pei Wang, Mute 67, 2024, Oil on linen, 80 x 40 cm (31 1/2 x 15 3/4 in)

Reuben Beren James, Untitled, 2024, Ink, paper and encaustic wax on 19mm wooden panel, 30 x 25 cm (11 3/4 x 9 7/8 in)

Again, the surface here gently flickers like an old Hollywood film noir, with such visual particulation serving to both arrest and test. The result are curious, wondrous images that feel as found as they are fabricated, turning viewer into voyeur as we revel in their poetry of silence, in spite of their bawdy yet strangely homogenised ambience.

The hushed enigma of Pei and Beren James’ grisaillerie continues afoot in Christopher Hartmann’s delectable Untitled (2024), offering a scene both quiet and chaotic. Waves of a previous, no doubt energetic exchange between two men ripple across a bed, undulating over compressed cushions and wrinkled sheets. This Still Life-cum-landscape painting is further embellished by a bed throw that meanders its way down the composition like a gushing stream of Kusama dots. However, the protagonists of Hartmann’s stage are the Calvin Klein underpants and socks strewn across the bed. Note the gaping holes fashioned by the tops of the socks and the large bulges that swell in the discarded underwear. More than relics of a heated moment, the clothes here assume the very actions their removal facilitated. Hartmann offers us a seductive stage, bathed in the night light of a bedside lamp that lends the painting an added erotic throb, yet the mood remains soft and thoughtful. Hartmann is an artist who transforms the abstract into the figurative, who turns a meditation on a fixed, objective moment into an extended consideration of an unfurling, subjective space. He is a painter who makes you as viewer, and his object as subject, feel at home even when the figure has come and gone, sounding silence; billowing stillness far, far away.

Christopher Hartmann, Untitled, 2024, Oil on linen, 80 x 60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

More abbreviations of the figure resound in the paintings of Rachel Lancaster. Arms Reach (2024) closes in on the back of a woman’s head and her neatly knotted hair. The painted surface is soft and milky, with an attention to volume – despite the image’s gentle haze – that recalls the Photopaintings of Gerhard Richter. Such gentleness of mood and application is then tested by the painting’s title. Arms Reach suggests a propensity for an action that, given the figure’s position with her back to us, can only mean an act of violence is about to unfold. That which felt supple now trembles. Shadow no longer models but worries the figure into a shushed stasis that questions the figure’s future well-being.

Rachel Lancaster, Arms Reach, 2024, Oil on canvas, 60 x 55 cm (23 5/8 x 21 5/8 in)

VI: HOME AND AWAY

This essay ends by looking at the work of Aaron Ford. A similarly soft serenity exhales from the two figures in his Two Women with Vases (2024), but the mood is here further antagonised by the artist’s liquid, inquisitive, slightly itchy line. Both sitters hold large vases: decorative yet utilitarian objects designed to hold celebratory bouquets of flowers, but which are empty. These vases are held close together by the sitter in orange, almost as if they are being protected, whilst the other sitter listens on her mobile phone. Both figures look down, somewhat solemnly, adding a perfume of melancholy to an air already heavy with hush. This atmosphere, humming with anticipation, thus reshapes the connotation of the vases. Rather than assume they are for flowers perhaps these vases function as urns, designed to contain the ashes of a loved one and the memories they hold for the sitters.

Aaron Ford, Two Women with Vases, 2024, Oil on canvas, 120 x 95 cm (47 1/4 x 37 3/8 in)

Ford’s portrait – the two sitters are real people, both friends of the artist – speaks to the dynamic and politics of family. Both women grew up in London but have families that are not British. Note the framed picture hanging on the wall occupying the top right corner of the composition. It is an original Iranian antique that belongs to the sitter – her name is Sarvin – seated on right and points proudly to her heritage. Just like this antique, the vase-cum-urns Sarvin so carefully protects thus becomes an act not just of memorialisation, but of generational maintenance: a passing of the family baton, so to speak. It is also worth noting Ford’s interest in depicting glass which, here, chimes materially with the vases. In many ways glass operates just like identity does: both provide lenses through which one can display or comprehend experience yet, of course, such experience is always fluid. Glass can reveal but it can also distort; it can offer clarity but can hoodwink the viewer with ripples of concave or convex otherness. Glass, like the antique and these vases, shows that the past always sits in the present and, here, it speaks to the future of these women living in a Britain that should welcome a kaleidoscope of otherness – in all its glorious colours – but often does not.

Family – born and chosen - brings us back to the very beginning of this essay and to the final analysis that notions of ‘home’ do not need to be understood in contradistinction to the language of ‘away’. People and families of all races, colours and creeds can co-exist in the same place and each can – and have the right to - call that place ‘home’. These artists’ shared focus on the figure cropped or abbreviated; fragile or fantastical; present or absent, shares such a vision. We are left with paintings that attempt to figure out Britain, but which are not just informed by a personal or national identity but are propelled by the greater force – and good – of humanity itself. And what is art’s role if not to hold up that glass of reflection to and for all of us and offer just a nibble of expression, confession and hope.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire 5-8 August 2024