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Review May 21 2009 « | »
Mute and Impotent before the Boot at Post Box Gallery What is or might be The Boot? poses the catalogue to Grant Foster, whose solo show it accompanies for......

Donald Eastwood

What is or might be The Boot? poses the catalogue to Grant Foster, whose solo show it accompanies for the next month. The Boot, capitalised, iconised, formalised leads into multiple intrigues in his work - war, the uniform, protection, violence, sadism, masochism, the seedy and the sexual - all of which can be seen in his Post Box Gallery show.

It is a rare pleasure to have a show catalogue for an emerging artist's show and this one has a preface written by Sacha Craddock, who along with Jake and Dinos Chapman sat on the panel which awarded Foster the respected 2008 John Moores painting prize. "Imagine how frightening, to be left in your house, cut off, a potential Swine flu carrier?" she preambles, though were it this week it may be equally suitably Professor Jennifer Graves announcing that the male chromosome is dying out or the theory that we ate all the Neanderthals.

Plenty of phrases in the catalogue and press release give good introductions to Foster's work: 'dirt and depravity', 'heightened sexuality of visceral material', 'the human condition and frailty', or even 'an enema for the enemy'. But it is the emotional violence, or as Foster himself puts it "Man's potential to switch between great acts of aggression and moments of extreme tenderness" and his metaphorical, often cartoonish, style that harbours both horror and oily black humour, which affect most heavily.

The selection gives a broad overview of his practice. There are characteristic intense, heavy impasto works such as Flag, showing a military figure with his face worn through or burrowed out, to works inspired from flashing sexual traumas in the Otto Muehl 1969 film Sodoma, which you can see on {Ubuweb here}. His most recent piece, Dementia, is a deliberate and impressive branching away from this intensity as the face's warping eyes seem to impregnate two figures in a blank addled mind.

The Post Box gallery has also put up ten works on paper, quicker works that expand both on Foster's excellent draughtmanship and the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the refined ideas of his canvas and board pieces. Be it for economic or intellectual reasons the tracing of the genesis of an artist's practice at this level is very impressive.

The gallery itself, which has championed an impressive group of emerging talent from the UK and Mexico since inception last year, is all round an ideal fit for the work. High-ceilinged, immaculately dressed in white and situated next to Phillips de Pury, beyond an entrance that has video screens embedded in the floor and a building reception bigger than the gallery itself, there is a sense of pathetic heroism to the space itself.

Mute and Impotent before The Boot runs at the Post box gallery until 18th June. Go to the website {here}, for the opening times and a glimpse at a few of the works.

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