Tyre Tread and Fall
The Air Gallery 32 Dover Street, London W1
Monday 1st - Saturday 6th December 2008
Richard Pomeroy is renowned for his fresh interpretations of landscape and architecture. His new paintings overlay haunting physical impressions of himself with the wildflowers of his local Somerset hedgerows, creating a startling juxtaposition that highlights the disjointed relationship between nature and man.
Pomeroy has often used hands, shirts and bundles of leaves to move his paint around. When his cycle of flower paintings was interrupted by the brutal lacerations of mechanical hedge trimming, he persuaded a local farmer to drive a tractor over the prepared canvases.
The resulting Tyre Tread, a distinctive pattern with strong intrusive/destructive connotations, creates a background for exquisite paintings of native flowers, a metaphor for the wanton destruction of our environment.
To make the Fall paintings the artist falls onto the paint, reminiscent of Jasper Johns and Yves Klein. The image - part x-ray, part memory, part theatrical performance - forms the backdrop to hugely magnified flowers and insects that float almost off the canvas.
These powerful images evoke Adam's fall from the Garden of Eden, Icarus, and, poignantly, the 'jumpers' who fell from the Twin Towers on 9/11. We also see the plunge taken by the artist as he embarks on a new body of work, in which he reveals himself - literally.
Yet there is also a sense of ecstasy, of man plunging into nature and art, an echo of Marvell's sensuous 'green thought in a green shade'.