28 February - 29 March 1998
As an idiom of the language of drawing, Ewan Gibbs' work takes the eye through a smooth transitional kaleidoscope of points of reference and points of recollection. Approaching genre, the matrix of the drawings, coming to look at them, is via a tradition of meticulous draughtsmanship and a psychology of perception and remembering. Locating them - through realising ways of configuration thought possible, or actual, with compositions tightly ordered adjacent to the paintings of de Hooch and Metsu.
Jason Martin's tracing of a passage, both ethereal and physical, of a move/moment in space and time, equally galvanises the process of painterly abstraction with that of high technique and beauty. Simultaneously discharging the myth of a modernist debate, the monochromes, slung over bilaterally opened surfaces, offer a lustrous cohesion gravitating closer toward Richard Prince's hoods than Robert Ryman.
Making a site, Alex Hartley takes the window as a redoubtable aperture from where to co-ordinate the room's architectural properties of light, space and feel. Inhabiting nebulous images with the contents of those properties, and presenting a mirroring of their own documentation, its context and texture, the room generates an internal gaze that, in the manner of Newman's Here I and II, is site, is situation.
