Zoe Troughton

As memories sometimes surface, evoked by a smell or a sound, so ephemeral impressions and allusions emerge from the paintings of three rising British artists; David Northedge, Andy Wicks and Matthew Atkinson. This experiencing, remembering and representing struck me as pivotal to Ultramegaok, a compact exhibition housed in a disused Hoxton office.

What was once an office, now reinvented with white wooden floor, white brick walls and recycled chandeliers, provided an intimate yet sleek gallery space. The artists' retelling of recalled space and ideas, dislocated from their origins and transcribed into paint, was itself displayed in a translated space. And although the concepts and consequent works were conceived independently, the exhibition held together neatly, seamlessly.

For me, three threads tied the work and its location together; size, layers and reinvention. In the case of David Northedge, loud and large canvases portrayed layers of images piled on top of one another, like an x-ray view of magazines sprawled on a waiting room table. The closer I looked the deeper into the painting I saw. Sharp, geometric lines, blasting comic book-like stars, silhouetted pin-ups, fragmented images of plastic surgery, and pixelated patches, give the impression of flicking through the assortment of magazines with urgency; our kaleidoscopic fix fulfilled.

Andy Wicks' work on the other hand exuded a feeling of permanency and duration; the effects of time and nature on man's temporal architecture. The rusty dribbles, reminiscent of a ship whose layers of marine blue paint have worn through to reveal the vulnerable iron core, still seem to be spreading. His paintings appear to bleed off the canvases, the subject too vast to fit in. The weight and linear precision of the blue greys feed the weeping movement of the backgrounds, succumbing to nature and to gravity, draining downwards.

Matthew Atkinson depicts vague, dream-like scapes, where scale is uprooted, and we are transported to a land of tree stumps, toadstools and miniature houses, or was it giant trees? His use of soft focus conjures the feeling of recapturing a dream, which then quickly disappears again in a thick fog. He addresses 'Disneyfication' and the reinvention of reality, however one is not left feeling pleasantly nostalgic about extraordinary fairytale fantasies, rather one is released into a more ominous and unsettling encounter.

Ultramegaok merges three distinct styles and agendas in one recycled space; it was a fascinating collection of revisited personal perceptions. Re- as a prefix indicates return to a previous condition, but displaced as I am in time and location, an attempt to recall my true experience at the gallery will always remain clouded by the passing of time and the memory's inclination to fall away.