A virtuosic exposition of both the astonishing plasticity of oil paint

and the artist’s thrill at her own facility, Toren Schvantzi’s

contribution to Urge Ourselves Under tempers her trademark single

image fixation with new maturity and control. Notwithstanding this,

the piece itself, twenty paired iterations on a death’s head, is

fatally compromised by the artist’s microscoping attention to the

underlying cod-existentialist teenage nihilism. A neanderthal growing

lightbulbs in a tent.

Warren Carvery’s collaged industrial aesthetic was initially motivated

by his distrust of digital manipulation and its liberating absence of

accountability. His cut and shut approach not only simplified his

choices, it also provided an exercise in locating a visual gap in the

source material, a discovery that freed him from the an obligation to

actual representation. The resultant forms are less structures than a

reactionary tone-poem of anti-Photoshop. But there is a sort of

knowing self-deception in the carefully aligned planes and inserts.

And it is arguable that although he suggests the collages as a form of

domesticated transcendence, the work itself is more suggestive of a

drily calibrated adjustment of design.

A startlingly capable and informed painter, Thomas Meissner’s handling

of the male figure in his large-scale oil canvases could be said to

fetishize the breakdown of the academic form, if he weren’t so cowed

by its attendant history. This is particularly apparent in the paint

handling, in which his considerable technical skill functions as

craven appeaser.

What unites these three artists is their willful subjugation to

impulse, even if the resulting work is fragile, self-congratulatory,

infantile, or a carefully assessed sop to taste.

The exhibition also includes Adrian Lee, whose recent environment

Island evokes both the sickly-sweet fug of the tropics and the

forgotten corporate corner of a head office feeling the crunch.

Dragging centre stage, from the liminal areas of urban existence, that

which is often overlooked and ignored. Is this the ghost of Vyner

Street future? As the big guns pack their bags and the offices arrive

perhaps it is not out of place, just early.