Turbulent Materiality

This summer Pontone Gallery mounts an exhibition of painters who are all obsessed with the materiality of their medium, which they each manipulate with a distinct and intense singularity.

Malcolm Liepke’s paintings assert his skilful and graphic iterations of human flesh in all its forensic intimacy. His gestural and fluent handling emphasises the delicate, bruised tones of his male and female models, framed by a bright and acidic variety of rich colour.

Timothy Spall elicits a profound spiritual response with a dark and brooding landscape that contains a discrete, but explicit, description of the crucifixion at Golgotha. Misty veils of charcoal greys are penetrated by shafts of sulphurous sunlight to reveal a tragic scene, glimpsed from afar but unmistakable.

Richard Harrison deploys vigorous and expressive passages of highly worked paint. Clots, clumps, streaks and sticky accretions are distressed and agitated by the artist’s urgent hand, eager to fashion an image of primal landscape from a chaos of turbid material.

Henry Jabbour explores a rich and sumptuous palette of shimmering primary hues. Glistening oil paint is freely applied in thick, creamy skeins and slicks against saturated, liquid glazes. Vestigial romantic figures hover in this world of subtle, painterly abstraction.