In his video, his drawing and now his watercolour he pushes the realism of naming, of description, beyond the bounds of reason and into an insensate fascination with the totality of what he sees. Trying to repeat this world for us leads him to draw with a finesse that finesses hyper‐realisms of the past, to make video and song works in which text, image and voice are so closely identified that we no longer know the difference between the seen and the heard.
In his currently developing series of watercolours his brushwork is pushed to such a point of topographic detail that it looks like an assault on the received common sense and sensibility of the medium.
In the drawings there is no drawing left, nothing more than the oily smear of graphite, something so indistinct, so free from chronology and topography, that is as if we can, now, see the unconscious. It's utterly unexpected.
A chav boy smells his Nike through a gas mask tube, an roughly handsome face receives the light; the never-natural passage of desire, of being at a remove, recorded like a fact of nature in Dürer; or never-nature, not ethnography; another new nature of the once new nature of the modern city, of its night time skies and ruinous lighting, ruined gutters and monuments brought into a topology of common ruin.
Adrian Rifkin, 2009
