Alec Cumming: To Wander, To Lust
The Gallery at NUA, Norwich
3 December 2013 - 11 January 2014
Review by Nick Warner
Fresh from his excursions in India, which culminated in an ambitious solo show at the British Council in New Delhi, East Anglian painter Alec Cumming presents his latest work at the Norwich University of the Arts Gallery.
Cumming has been producing abstract paintings for years. In this most recent body of work, the artist appears most concerned with communicating a new level of maturity, or perhaps worldliness, in his practice. I would not call it an autonomous new style, as such, but neither would I maintain that there is anything incidental about the changes in Cumming’s work.
Instead there is a decisive effort on behalf of the artist to paint in a fresh manner. More assertive is the application of paint to canvas, less apologetic is the brashness of the abstraction. More discernable are the elements of figuration that appear amongst the unreadable forms. These paintings speak, or rather shout with all the efforts of a young artist home from a long trip and keen to show his contemporaries how the displacement has impacted on his work.
It is not, however, exclusively brashness and confidence that lie behind his increasingly developed approach. There are works among those presented here that display a sparseness and refinement in wild contrast to the brutality of the other works. Paintings such as ‘I Was There (Lost On A Promise)’ (2012) and several ‘Untitled’ artworks use white as their base colour. This creates a space around the forms that Cumming is proposing to suggest a bleaker outlook. Many of the shapes put forward in these works are unfilled scribbled outlines supporting weightier blocks of brown, yellow and beige.
More colourful works such as ‘Making A Move’ (2012) and ‘Little Pink Wallahs I & II’ (2012) depict hands and fingers - fat little pink sausages - in glowing reds and magentas. In these paintings, the body is presented as sexually charged, or at least possessing the same intensity - strained, clenched, swollen and flushed. The hands, lips and faces that recur throughout the show are, by turns, either shining and intense or de-saturated and subdued. This is possibly the most bipolar collection of paintings to be shown in series.
The show comprises 21 paintings, all notably larger than his previous works. They take on new stature, and this along with the quantity of them illustrates the grand efforts of this painter. The show is an ambitious undertaking for the affiliate gallery of a regional university. The combination of less populated, earth-toned paintings and the to-the-point corporeality of the more colourful works is indicative of the breadth of Cumming’s palette, and his formal and conceptual address.
