Super Natural

3^rd – 20^th November 2010
Private View 2^nd November 6 –9pm

Oil paint is base matter, the prima materia, with material properties akin to many substances: organic sludge, body fluids, mud and clay, at the same time as liquid light. In these animal, vegetable and mineral forms paint re-materialises the doubtful visual evidence of the physical world. Simulacra are made flesh.

From the myth of Echo and Narcissus to Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot – only viewing the world through a mirror, ‘to weave the mirror’s magic sights’ into the form of a tapestry – the mirror has been a potent symbolist motif and object for philosophical speculation. Monet’s late water lily paintings, for example, fuse the perceptual complexities between painted substance, canvas and lake surfaces, and mirrored reflection.

Super Natural brings together the work of six artists whose work variously shows paint in the process of emergence, of becoming something other than itself. Paradoxical combinations of hand-made materiality and apparently automatic imitation or reduplication are presented through diverse painting genres and styles. These range between landscapes, interiors and still lifes, with mechanical, expressive or realist painting techniques.

Discovering and working through analogies between paint on canvas and natural or technological phenomena reveal painting as an experiential testing ground. Painting can be seen as a supernatural agency – a psychic medium – where painterly transformation into realist illusion is mirrored by close attention to physical transubstantiation. Equivalent to cloning, animation or metamorphosis, lifeless matter is in the process of becoming fluid, living stuff.