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From: RS
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 09 January 2004
http://www.smyerscough.freeserve.co.uk/gallery_frame.htm
Hmmm, said the hummer to the singer. Really didn't like Nick Archers's paintings, they were dull, just same faces with a blurring effect. Made one feel weary for the failure of figurative painting. Compare the smart John Currin, the prime exponent of people in pictures. The difference is Currin makes you care, the rest just make images in paint, without hope that they could be any more than that. Gkotsi's large painting of a diseased face had a kitsch quality, like a painting of clown , both in the elaborate blobby technique and the subject. This could be disturbing and effective but that doesn't happen, either because of the gallery context or because the face fills the frame, which is a convention of contemporary portraitue, see chuck close, jason brooks etc. Patricia's Rories self portaits project her into various computer gameish scenarios, and they're painted in a graphic smooth kind of way. They have an alluring edge, but don't convince, though there is the pontential for them to become seductive, in that case the paint would have to be beautiful, and the colours carefully modulated which at the moment they fall short of being.
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