Ian Whittlesea, Caitlin Yardley, Marcus Cope, Susie Green

Marcus Cope – „In the Balance, etc.“

Marcus Cope’s paintings begin with memories or images of memories (which aren’t the same thing), preserved and detached through photographs or stories, and reworked at some remove from the original source or location. As if a singular, often uneventful, encounter needed to be worked out through painting. And sometimes that working out can’t help repeating, transposing, as motif from one painting or context to another.

But there’s much more at work in the making of the painting itself. Layers of making send the image further away from the viewer, or pull it forward. Where are you looking? What do you need to unsee in order to gain an image? What materially obstructs or enhances your view? At some level there’s a push pull between figuration and abstraction always at work, within explicitly, albeit ambiguous, narrative paintings.

Susie Green – „Double Trouble“

If sensuality forms a large part of the subject matter explored in Susie Green’s work, so the mediums in which she works reflect a sensual relationship to materials. Highly liquid paints are absorbed into the surface an erotics of making, for example, where the making is as seductive as the iconography explored. Subject matter and handling become one. And in turn the imagery can be turned into repeated forms, motifs or patterns. This process of reworking takes the image away from source material, while retaining the charge of that point of origin.

A larger than life version of Susie enigmatically welcomes you to her exhibition, dressed in her own hand painted sweater. Performance is a key component to Green’s work, but this presentation of herself is offered as feature of generosity, an ambiguous contrast to the fetish-garb persona of her Club Goddess video. Where is the public or private face?