Mark Vaux: ‘OV. S.9.’, 2014
Almost anything goes in painting these days – no need for paint or ground, for example, let alone a particular shape. But a shaped canvas remains the norm, and the overwhelming majority are rectangular. By way of alternative, the circular tondo is notoriously awkward to handle. Perhaps there should be more ovaloids, such as Thomas Grünfeld’s playfully macabre ‘Augenbilder’, which incorporate glass eyes so that the painting seems to look at the viewer. Just so, Marc Vaux revealed some exemplary (eggsemplary?) examples at Bernard Jacobson 2-31 May. They’re constructs as well as ovals, Vaux being a fine multiplier and exploiter of edges as a means of complicating space, colour and light. Perhaps what the format needs is a snappy popularising name (elipso!?). Triangles are also unusual, especially when pointing down. Yet my favourite works in Darren Flook’s first curation for Max Wigram (‘Ice Fishing’, to 26 July), are three such triangles by the Chicago-based McArthur Binyon, divided with cunning near-symmetry into one almost-half covered with obsessively ground-in wax crayon, the other subjected to laser-printed images rendered ghostly by submersion in oil stick . Their back story – and the images’ source – is as a parallel for his family’s transition from tenant farming in rural Mississippi to factory work in Detroit. ‘The same hands’, says Binion, ‘which bled picking cotton as a child, now bleed from the abrasion of colored wax on wood.’
McArthur Binion: ‘Stelluca VII’, 2011
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
