John Hurrell – 28 August, 2018

The dozen new Dale Frank paintings at Gow Langsford surprise with their shift away from intensely saturated colour and embracing of viscous, oozy, smooth transparent resins towards dominantly grey or silvery aluminium hues, and highly tactile, roughly textured, raw surfaces. They are less liquid now (like clear honey) and more like aerial landscapes—with cracked and flaked mudlike allusions; or clusters of wrinkled, folded and compressed, mini-mountain ranges.

Mixed in are painterly smears and faint dragged brush marks on clear transparent resin, hovering just above the ‘satellite vistas’ like delicate clouds, while under the ‘land’—now and then—we see flashes of tinted slivered mirror. The dominant greyish textures are extraordinarily dense, the colours more subtle, the compositions more adventurously lopsided—packed with organic movement and worked over ‘geological’ surface. Less watery now; they are like thick mud with drying cracks or wrinkles.

Because of their densely nuanced surfaces and pale tertiary colours, these very controlled (but spontaneously organised) paintings take time to carefully look over. They are amazingly rich in tactility, looking weather-beaten and organic. Every square inch seems busy, yet there is no sense of clutter. With the silvery metallic paint they come across as toxic, though indisputably delicately beautiful; noxiously exhilarating even, but creepily beguiling.

These unusually complex sandwiched works (that have drolly entertaining titles) with their resined over-surfaces placed on mirrors, underneath speak of earth and bark textures and ancient skin. Elemental qualities abound, while poured and frenetically agitated planes with intricately ‘embedded’ bubbly conglomerates determinedly seek our attention.

John Hurrell

Print | Facebook | Twitter | Email