Everything must go…

From Rebecca Gallo…

A useless old vacuum cleaner in front of a hand-painted garage door; water flowing down a gutter into a drain overseen by a peeping tree; an abandoned fridge-freezer, upper door swung open, casting its angular shadow on the pavement just so. Nick Collerson’s second solo show of paintings at The Hughes Gallery, Everything Must Go, is a catalogue of odd, abandoned and obsolete objects, spaces and figures.

Collerson’s paintings are not an exercise in perfecting the imperfect – they don’t seduce through hyperrealism, detailed surface texture or glossy highlights. They are deadpan and unforgiving, with clouds of dust and mire added in where there were probably none. Space is shallow, and in many paintings a fence, a rendered wall or a wood veneer panel refutes deeper entry into the land of illusion. Within this shallow space, Collerson sets up odd compositions that are unexpectedly satisfying in their sensitive and poetic distribution of form, colour and texture. In Later On (Geological Time) a plaited plastic deck chair rests behind a household paint tin, blue dripped careless from its rim. A mixing stick, its end tipped with the same, is propped up against a wall, pointing to a postcard of a landscape scene. Collerson portrays things that are inconsequential, some even ugly, with such a skillful sense of tone, texture and placement as to render them deeply appealing and perplexingly beautiful.

Until October 27
The Hughes Gallery, Surry Hills
Pic: Nick Collerson, Freezer, 2015, oil on linen, 137 x 183 cm.