James Rielly - Jeffrey Dennis - Pat O’Connor – Sophie von Hellermann - Markus Vater

The Timothy Taylor Gallery has brought together five artists, some mid-career and some still at college, in a show that reveals a shared perception of the fragile and transient in current figurative painting.  While the work of each artist is distinct, they can be compared in their appropriation of found imagery from popular urban culture infused with a profound sense of the human and personal.
 
James Rielly is exhibiting for the first time in London a series of watercolors on paper, which capture the essence of appropriated images of the young, abused or abusive with a deadpan yet tender quality. The result is a disturbing and introverted melancholy that avoids sentimentality. Stuart Morgan has written of Rielly’s paintings: “Undefined surfaces breed fantasy...Pastel colors allow the unconscious to supply what is lacking. Supplied instead is experience based on moment partly staged, like poses for photographs, either overdoing or standing to attention instead of trying to seem relaxed.”
 
Pat O’Connor’s tiny paintings on scraps of exercise book paper are drawn from her fascination with the vulgar and constructed world of adverts and fashion photography. Each painting begins from a single cutting but displaces the individuals from a context with which they might be identified; the allusions to reality are undermined by the absurdity of their poses. Through O’Connor, the polished and over-produced products of glossy magazines face reality as next week’s forgotten rubbish. Images of models and celebrities are transformed into fragile and personal mementos. 
 
Jeffrey Dennis’s paintings capture disparate thoughts and images encountered during his everyday life in East London. Diminutive figures of anonymous people passed in the street are lost in a vacuum of bubbles and appropriated images of sumptuous interiors or trite photo-story magazines, building tension between urban substance and superficiality. The disjointed space in Dennis’s paintings is, however, undercut by the suggestion of a potential interconnectedness between the individual and the occurrences depicted.
 
Markus Vater is one of the stars of this year’s RCA Degree Show. His work stretches across many media, including video, performance, animation and collaborative events. For this exhibition Vater has contributed a series of paintings taken from photographs. The paintings are an attempt to answer some recurring questions: Can a painting look at you? Where does the ‘you’ stop and where does the ‘other’ start? What’s the difference between people you know and love and people you don’t know and love? How is loneliness related to beauty?
 
Sophie von Hellermann is currently in her first year at the Royal College of Art.  Executed extremely quickly and often on a large scale, the images well up from an imagination that is as familiar with popular culture and clubland as it is with arthouse films and classic literature.  Von Hellermann gives herself themes to work with, such as the enigmatic and ill-destined figure of Anastasia, which inspire intense images with an intangible ability to provoke a sense of familiarity in the viewer.