The Way It Is

Solo Exhibition

Catalogue with text by Jo Melvin

With this exhibition the gallery continues its survey of British contemporary abstract painting, having already hosted the work of Ian Davenport, Alexis Harding and Mark Francis.

Daniel Sturgis is interested in pattern, the bright colours of web and commercial design, and the conversations within post-modern painting. The works contain complicated boundaries constructed with repetitive highly suggestive shapes that take our eyes on uneven paths before finally creating a visual balance, where hybridity is not negative or disruptive but a source of wit, beauty and even harmony. Daniel Sturgis has said: "I have often thought about these paintings in relationship to setting up an ordered system but then allowing in imperfection and accepting that imperfection. Allowing in difference. Being comfortable with it. They are not mathematically set up, but approximations. Elements shift and are in slightly the wrong place, but that’s ok, your mind seems to have permission to correct them, to work out the elements, to straighten the way that they are drawn or balanced, or imbalanced”.

These are paintings that seem to speak only of colour, flatness and design, but then allude to space and time. They may seem humorous but they aspire to be meditative. They are paradoxical: they seem noisy but are silent. Time seems suspended or poised. And these are not just images: these are strictly hand-painted paintings. What appears to be fast is realised slowly. Within their apparent simplicity there is complexity and in their apparent strangeness a rich and harmonious vision.

• http://www.lucatommasi.it
• http://www.danielsturgis.co.uk/downloads...