ROBERT WELCH: Shiftwork
4 – 14 May 2011

Solo exhibition of recent paintings
introduced by Mali Morris

There is a quality I have always admired and savoured in Robert Welch's paintings - an economy of form that feels like the ease of decision after dilemma, deliberation carried out elsewhere. The how and what of depiction seem to collapse into each other, which looks like innocence, but is not. There is nothing didactic here, painting is not being used to make a point, but is being inhabited, as a practice. I feel aware of an effort being invested in not making gratuitous claims for it.

The photographer/artist Walker Evans, in his lecture Lyric Documentary, described his ambivalence to both those words, believing that if documentary truth is aimed at, it will be missed, and that "the lyric is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally…." (1). I think that in his work as painter/artist, Rob is aware of the power of metaphor in his chosen imagery, the glimpsed fragments of our ordinary days, but his conscious activity is in examining what he understands to be the terms of painting (because of the power he feels in paintings), and how this could relate to his own experience of being in and looking at the world today (because that too is felt). Description and the poetic are not sought, but might be arrived at.

The most recent paintings risk - and win - with even higher stakes than usual. They are pared down, ambiguous, emptied out, almost monochromatic. But, with a true instinct for how paradox can be at the heart of what is mysterious and moving about painting, they are generous and luminous, filling up, as I look at them, with colour, honesty, and light.

Copyright: Mali Morris March 2011

(1) Lecture at Yale, 1964, quoted in Walker Evans at Work, Ed. Jerry L Thompson, 1994.

Adapted from an essay on Robert Welch's paintings, now available to read online, first published in the magazine Turps Banana, Issue 8.

www.turpsbanana.com www.malimorris.co.uk

For further information about the exhibition please contact the gallery on 020 7833 2674