congeries
a collection of disparate things heaped together

I chose the title for this latest series of paintings a little mischievously, as it hints at disorder, chance and randomness, and this is certainly one of the guiding drives of the paintings. But equally, there is the drive to order, coherence and composition. The tension between these opposing forces of flux and fusion defines the territory.

Bruce Russell October 2002

Disorder, contradiction and disguise are central to the workings of these oddly personal and cunningly contrived abstractions . . . Out of intriguing visual games and playful propositions Russell makes arrestingly idiosyncratic images that will not resolve themselves into a formal stillness, an ordered gestalt.

Mel Gooding

Curlicues, criss-crossed slabs of paint and initialled signatures trade on a type of painted mark which simultaneously connotes the hand-made, machine-printed and computer-generated . . . the paintings incorporate a multitude of sign systems drawn historically from consumer, mass-public or more esoteric tropes that Russell has encountered since childhood: 1950s textile patterns, transport maps, machine diagrams, Kuniyoshi prints . . .

Chris Horrocks

Luxor, oil on canvas, 2002, 76 x 76 cm.

Nile, oil on canvas, 2002, 76 x 76 cm.

Dakar, oil on canvas, 2002, 76 x 76 cm.

Accra, oil on canvas, 2002, 76 x 76 cm.

Things in these paintings seem caught as at the edge of vision, seen out of the corner of the eye, incompletely perceived. The canvas edge becomes itself a metaphor for the great and inescapable cut-off of the unseen from the seen, the edge of knowing.

Mel Gooding

congeries

Recent Paintings by Bruce Russell
Beardsmore Gallery, London
7 - 30 November 2002

photos Niall Buchanan

World’s Fair, oil on canvas, 2001, 76 x 230 cm.