Overview
At 9 Cork Street, London W1S 3LL.
Bumps live in almost every painting. They develop from molecular flashes of the painter’s brush; lie dormant in secreted junctures obscured by archaeologies of abstraction, or gently froth in those granular idiosyncrasies quietly authoring a metamorphosis of the physiognomic into the gnomic. Bumps are seeds that serve to swing or sway the movement, direction, image, or index of a painting, infecting a range of different assertions voiced across the dissonant terrains of surface, action, mark, gesture, figure, intent, subject, and detail: all moments locked into a composition that, when attended, unlock the pattern of its presence and the epistemological entanglements they breed.
Matt Carey-Williams’ inaugural Episode, Bump, makes for a hearty soup, with a variety of paintings making manifest the heady, electric variation of such jarring, twitchy germination. The bump can be the impossibly meticulously rendered hair of an eyelid; the elongated, evaporating sweep of a single brushstroke; the rumpus of one colour thwarting the harmony of its surrounding palette; the absence that replaces an expected presence. Bumps phrase painterly singularities, where nothing momentarily becomes something and vice versa, triggering compositions and their protagonists into various states of alarm, action and even ambiguity. They survive across spectra of expression, in plains both hyper-realistic and amoebic and care not for the forms and planes they influence. Whilst they may dislocate or discombobulate, bumps always seek to orchestrate the flux and fizz of a painted surface, simultaneously positioning and empowering themselves as cause, effect and aftermath of a composition’s mark, matter and meaning, leading it – and us – into the light.
