A Collector’s Note - August

The Diary of an Art Advisor

By late July, every art-world email seems to contain the words ‘summer’, ‘sun-drenched’ or ‘escape’. Meanwhile, the paintings worth looking at are often doing something less obliging. They catch on a bent chair, a handful of cherries, the jumble reflected in a pocket mirror or an encounter in a kitchen where nobody appears entirely pleased to be there.

This month’s Collector’s Note brings together four such works. Gabriella Day has recently completed her MFA at the Slade and makes paintings whose awkwardness is part of their intelligence. Kate Burling turns fruit, flesh and landscape into forms that seem to melt into one another. Thomas Hylander gives a small domestic object the visual confusion of a minor catastrophe. Samantha Cary stages an elaborate two-part drama of sex, fantasy and grievance against a green brick wall.

The works range from £2,000 to £18,000. That is a broad financial span, although the prices are less interesting than the different kinds of appetite involved. Day’s painting is large, raw and comically resistant to good manners. Burling’s is compact and seductive. Hylander’s rewards the sort of slow looking that reveals how unreliable the first glance can be. Cary’s diptych has the scale and narrative abundance to dominate a room.

What connects them is a distrust of things staying in their appointed category. A chair starts behaving like a limb. Hills become folded fabric. A mirror swallows the room around it. A kitchen becomes a Western, a boudoir and a private reckoning. Each artist lets the image misbehave a little. That is usually where the life gets in.