SARAH DOUGLAS
Letters Home

18 - 28 May 2011

introduced by Julian Bell

It's a strange allure that Sarah Douglas's paintings have for me, but a strong one. They jolt my nerves and then my nerves come back asking for more. As with the bitter of retsina or the menace of a Bartok string quartet, I'm wondering, how come I'm drawn to this? My God, her palette disturbs. That singular oscillation she perfects between tawny pinks and eaux-de-nil (pork past its sell-by served up with sour cream) is not exactly airless - it's amazing the range of vistas she can suggest with it - but nor does it ever let you simply breathe, relax. Everything's bracing, close and urgent, as in an operating theatre. Pictorial medicine: the possibility of infection and excision habitually hovers, or else wells up in some gross carmine blurt.
I might reach - the banal way critics do (it's their archetypal fallacy) - for the notion that Sarah Douglas has some unique burden of trauma to unload upon the world. But what do I know? The painter I've met combines metropolitan savvy with a slightly offbeat moral seriousness. She comes equipped with a recherché trove of images - often ethnographic in origin, e.g. staked shrines on tropic coasts - and with a reverence for Morandi and Bourgeois. The Italian still-lifer might be a hero to anyone intent on creating concise painted objects with a concision of means. And no doubt you could refer the tenor of Douglas's pictures to that ethos of 'the abject' people find in the French sculptor.
But I see the relation more this way. Douglas, like Bourgeois, thinks verbs. The kinds of hand-act she goes for are: gather, tie, seal, sever. Equally, you get anti-actions - dangle, drop, let drain. These motor impulses, which I feel underpin her choice of imagery, get translated from the 3D of sculptural construction into a very fine-judged dialogue of paint movements. The quality of these paintings (the answer, in other words, to the question I was asking myself) lies above all in their internal edges, where one verb, one intent to make and to mark, runs into another - bleeds into it, indeed, it may be. That tussle of sealed-off and porous (the house against the floodwaters) repeats on multiple scales from the micro of the brushwork upwards, and it would be another critical banality to itemize its symbolic potential. Enough, for me, to sense that as these enigmatic and dangerous canvases issue from Douglas's studio, the pulse of painting in London today gets to throb just slightly quicker.

Julian Bell 2011

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