Saturday 5 September 2020

Brian Mountford : Recent Paintings

    'Everlasting Gobstopper' - Brian Mountford


Mountford's paintings appear to be the nightmare imaginings of Philip Gustons crude and bloated paranoid figures.

 

Perplexing tapestries and tumbles of gizzards and body parts caricaturing the ponderous heft of real meaty innards. Or crudely and painfully dismantled living portraiture trapped in a hamster wheel of perpetual disassembly.

 

There's a hastily assembled pile of splayed hands and crinkled chunks of flesh peppered with eyeballs, their synchronised mechanical stares keening towards a point outside the framing rectangle of the canvas. Sausages of intestines are about to transmutate into turgid larva or insectoid pastiches of optic nerves. A blindly mechanistic tangle of tubes acts as a lumpen concretion of cartoon matter.

 

All cling to the wall like idiot hierarchies of dead materials straining towards agency and autonomy. Occasionally they are infected by decorative patterns which seem to creep like predatory abstractions dismantling the saccharine optimism of the colourful and synthetic palette.

 

Tethered to the picture surface by coloured muck, these psychedelic cousins of

Arcimboldo's proto-Surrealist vegetable heads suffer from a vague awareness of their own impermanence as whimsical fictions, contingent on external forces always beyond their comprehension.

 

It is not just a case of a staging of the typography of flesh as a psychological model of the human psyche or, indeed, a fixing of any concept within this cryptozoology of peculiar hybrids.

 

For Mountford the act of picturing an image is itself the essential core of the fact of painting. That's why the creatures of Mountford's dreamscapes radiate ennui and angst, like sullen hormonal teenagers they resent the processes building them whilst being begrudgingly aware that they are products of these processes.

 

The ineffable slipperiness of material objects as embodied meaning is being repeatedly restaged as potential narrative jumbles of a distantly remembered, antique plasticity.

 

But these cartoon distortions cannot indulge themselves by lounging in the way-station of the liminal, this will never be a comforting option, they remain perpetually impressed in the crust of surface paint that birthed them.

 

Without the possibility of recourse to material volume, they fall back on optical

volume to demand attention; strident and giddy bastard children of headshop posters.

 

Neon pseudocoma victims dreaming of the slop and sweat of imperfect flesh, they perform their poses whilst pleading for release from the eternal circus of art as a painterly self-flagellation and performance for the viewers entertainment.

  




 

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