Stephen Carter
‘I discover my subject by walking through the city. This tends to be a slow, gradual process and has taken the form of an eastwards drift along and under the elevated roads of the A40 Westway and has now reached Paddington Basin – these new paintings are based on the spaces around the fringes of Paddington Station.’
Although the station itself is busy and full of people, these liminal spaces are quiet and deserted. The lack of light here ensures that forms are easily misread, inviting alternate interpretations of their structure and function. The paintings push that indeterminate state towards a flatness set against perspectival space, and emphasise the architecture’s asssertive frontality – a sense that the structures block passage. These paintings are not surrealist, but they show a reconstructed urban reality by pressing the painterly against the planned.
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