John Moores 2025 Painting Exhibition

 

At Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery is the John Moores 2025 open submission painting biennial, a gathering together of examples of work from the UK’s painterly art practitioners.

Established in 1957, it has long since been a mainstay of the British ‘art scene’, priding itself on being a fairly good indicator of the diverse mutations of contemporary painting. This 33^rd incarnation is the most enjoyable for some time, a straightforward presentation accommodating for all things flat and largely rectangular. Reining in that hoary old incarnation ‘painting as expanded practice’ has paid off.

Artist-makers in mid-process are pictured in David Caine’s ‘Monstrous Endeavour’, in which a stern sculptor chips away at a rough stone head, warm grey rubble littering the studio floor, and in Oscar Grasby’s ‘Portrait Of The Artist’, blue-whites showing a painter working in his studio on a circular picture of a figure painting, a sleeping dog adds a bold diagonal, a figure is framed in a distant doorway. All very meta and self-referential.

With a nod to unsettled times, nomadic shelters populate surfaces in Joanna Whittle’s ‘Darkened Heart’ and in Deborah Grice’s ‘Safehold’, the use of phosphorescent paint a bit showy and unnecessary.

The anonymity of figments and fragments of memory, often mediated by photography and the digital then transcribed into painting, will always show within contemporary group exhibitions. There’s the rearing, restrained attack dog balanced with a narrow column of fleshy hand spread acrylics in Colin Crumplin’s large, unbalanced diptych ‘Dog’, an outsourced family portrait fabricated in China in Jamie Holman’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ (the hooded father figure emphasising the makers anonymity undercutting much contemporary work).

 The most resonant example of this stable of practitioners is David Gledhill’s transcription of a flea market sourced 1940s photograph of a young woman ‘Untitled (Arrested)’. Gledhill’s facility with paint avoids being flashy, never at the expense of the importance of the arresting image with its nuanced and considered cropping and feathery charcoal browns.

 The boozy funscape of urban life is largely sidelined by a greater weighting towards the psychodrama of interior spaces moving between the shadowy profiles in Clare Haward’s ‘The Party’ or the functional chaos of personal spaces in Tim Patrick’s ‘Nightbed’ or Louis Pohl Koseda’s Marlowe’s Room’.

 Art can act as the culturally sanctioned transgression of staring at the otherness of another body for a sustained period carrying an element of pleasing incorrectness. In Heeyoung Noh’s ‘A Mother And Her Daughter’ the wet skin of the seated bathers and blankness of the faces radiate a comfortable indifference to the viewers eye.

The potential intimacy of surface materials shows in the crumpled white of Katy Shepherd’s ‘Bedscape’ and Stig Evan’s ‘000022-286’, painted grey rectangles of folded vintage toilet paper reflattened for window-mounted presentation.

More aggressively tangible, Eleanor Barlett’s ‘Mother Matter’ shows the stubborn presentness of physical stuff, Molly Thomson’s ‘Proposition’ has angular creamy flat off-cuts constructing a different kind of solidity. At the overtly painterly end of the spectrum in Louise Evan’s small ‘Frayed At The Sides’ lumpen troughs of the real stuff of paint fan in muddied warm oranges across a wooden support.

The dematerialisation of the image, a milky fading of image and form also gets a look-in, the fogged perception of a Reinhardt or Rothko in Tom Chamberlain’s ‘Come What May’ or the skeleton of a potential interior painting in Shaan Syed’s two-panel oil on linen ‘The Judge’s Quarters: Facing West’, an architect-style drawing of an old court-room now converted into a restaurant. It seems like a blankly functional statement of blue lines but niggles seductively.

Particularly successful as a visual brain-worm of muted oddness is Evan Thomas’s ‘Souvenir (After Chardin)’, a small canvas peppered with unfocussed transcriptions of a floral design lifted from a Chardin still life.

Within a painting, to be visible is to be inert, passive: a static almost-object for contemplation. A painting can also operate as a shallow ghost-box carrying intimations or iterations of spectres of solidity, of things departed or about to arrive. The surface acts as a buffering screen commanding a viewer’s wait time and impatience, eating time whilst momentarily compacting potentially contradictory spaces.

Ally Fallon’s winning entry ‘If You Were Certain, What Would You Do Then?’ accommodates for all these facts in an enjoyably pithy way. Colourful but restrained, an implied simple interior space constructed from rectangular areas presenting the different ways paint as a material can be applied to a surface.

It presents ambient washes and bleeds of colour, a hovering rectangle of an off-white crawl of looping paint, a suggestion of a pale decorative base or floor area with a cartoonish Lovecraftian tentacles moving in from stage left. A darkly humorous nod towards the infective needling surface crawl of colour that patterns areas of the painting – all presented at a scale smaller than the often bombastically large entries which tend to bully space for the viewers’ attention.

For Fallon, the simple pleasure of building the visual is proposed, a playful opposition to the nostalgic melancholia ingrained in an automatic acceptance of a more regular and traditional picture space. It’s a straightforward reminder of paintings unique ability to fold and ossify movement and time.

The works success is in the way it tangles complicated propositions in a delightfully exuberant display of the liveliness of painting as practice.

Awarding a prize for best painting always feels strangely wrong but, if it has to happen, this year the jury have made an intelligently considered choice.