Afterburn 24 May-1 June 2009

AFTERBURN, The Studios, 30b Henley Street

Emily Alexander, Jaya Mansberger, Philip Marston, Sam Race.

Sam Race's most recent works Because of all we've seen and The love letter come from collecting images of furniture from the internet and making sense of them by representing them together, somehow it is about reappropriating the foreign. There is a lot of tenderness and intimacy in the texture: their size and technique as well as using oil on board are reminiscent of the past Burgundian and Flemish masters. Having just come back from the Brookes’ end of year students’ exhibition, it was interesting to compare these two paintings with the LOL installation as they all are a response to the virtual world, one using traditional material (oil on wood), the other being an installation. LOL (Laugh out loud) is a series of open laptop computers, each showing 'funny' videos from youtube. It is both touching and scary, perhaps reflective on what Baudrillard could have written on the 'man bubble' created by virtual universes.

Jaya Mansberger's latest style is perhaps more austere and small-scaled than her previous works such as her Untitled series (2006) representing young women in whitish hoodies. Her triptych Veiling the Empty (2009) or Silence (2009) makes me think, quite rightly, about what Lucian Freud used to say about art, that it has to do with urgency. One could almost hear silent screams. There is also another triptych with oils on round canvasses The Trance, Afterwards and the Turnaround (2009)

Emily Alexander's photographs Perceptions of Absence also deal somehow with silent screams with images of what looks like a deserted hospital. One image, of a patient's room, is particularly moving, and could easily be perceived as a metaphor on death. Each picture is strongly constructed and their playing with 'clair-obscur' is once again reminiscent of the intimate scenes of the Flemish.

Philip Marston is the only artist in the exhibition to be dealing with multi-media installation. There’s this installation where you “burn” the image of balloon on your retina, or a piece of paper subjected to blue light. One wishes more explanation would be provided on something perhaps too intriguing on its own.

It is definitely an exhibition to go to, either on your way to, or back from Brookes' exhibition as they complement each other, one using traditional material (painting, etching), the other more contemporary (performance art, mixed-media).