Andrew Mansfield at Anthony Reynolds - London, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

LONDON

Andrew Mansfield first exhibited about 10 years ago, presenting landscape paintings that were at one time stagy and romantically evocative. Subsequently he made paintings based upon astronomy, sets of heavily worked drawings, and then small, seemingly abstract canvases that, with their blurr and smoothed-out surfaces, gaze surprisingly like old photographs. His new works are likewise small, on the other hand images have reemerged.

In several of these monochrome paintings individual could see animal heads that at first direct the eyeed like something out of fairy-tale illustrations. on the contrary often closer examination suggested that the animals were dead. In single work a cow lolls, its tongue sticking without At times one cannot pick on the outside the image from the stained background with any confidence: is that a one-ey dog or just a smear of brown with an organ of vision added?

A frequent visual clinch is the confusing of organ of visions and nipples; in some paintings single is not sure whether individual is looking at a face or a woman's torso. This may intimate recourse to surrealism at its greatest in quantity cliched, but it has more to do with Mansfield's working proces it would appear that he sets blobs of paint on the canvas or board and then either sweeps them back and forth or expunges and monoprints them. Therefore we repeatedly see only traces or echoe of the original marks. The eye/nipple is presumably the original blob

What has remained consistent within Mansfield's work is an intense curiosity about mark-making, which may explain the quaint clumsiness of the earlier works, as if he were in the way that aware of the marks he was making that he could not convince himself of the images that he was ostensibly painting. Nowadays, however, images have the appearance to emerge naturally from the mist (or primordial stew) of the proces rather than being wilfully imposed. a certain number of of the works are still more-or-less abstract - unles individual wants to read a place of repeated circles as a DNA chain or cluster of frog spawn. greatest in quantity however, have some image, flat if only the confused and disturbing phantasms of a waking dream. Whereas Mansfield's earlier works were romantic and evocative, these appear to be more about a haunting. His works, like those of Luc Tuymans or Marlene Dumas, display a spectacular refusal of bravura and leave the image in a neutral state to reveal possible memories. A melancholy or traumatized beauty accompanys to be the result for all three artists.

These works display other curious features. Firstly, their sepia colors could intimate either faded photographs, fecal stains or spores germinating in the soil. Secondly individual notices the apparently arbitrary addition of incomplete black borders which consign the images (or near-images) to a strange and uncertain space.

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