Dexter Dalwood: English Painting – ArtMonthly

1 November 2024

Dexter Dalwood’s ambitious, witty show of new works, his first at Lisson Gallery, samples and channels history, art history and music memory in an attempt to define ‘English’ painting. His composite methods have developed out of a distinctive use of collage and fragments, but here the visual architecture feels more personal and internal in mood. Did the stylistic and conceptual roots of this show start with his residency in Oaxaca in 2017 or 40 years earlier in 1977, when Dalwood headlined London’s legendary Roxy Club playing bass in the short-lived Bristol-based punk band The Cortinas? It is evident that the artist’s subsequent move to Mexico provided vital distance for him to make sense of what he left with and what he left behind. In a recent series called ‘This Does Not Belong to Me’, 2021–22, Dalwood tried to understand a painted history of Mexico, from ancient Mixtec Codices to specially commissioned 20th-century murals; he was particularly drawn to David Alfaro Siqueiros’ mural Mexican History or the Right for Culture, 1952–56, which highlights the dates that shaped the country’s independence. This prompted Dalwood to create a contemporary timeline that included a massacre in 1968 and the disappearance of 43 students in 2014. At a moment of increased violent nationalism and the decolonising of images, could he apply a similar method to interrogating a painted history of England?

Dalwood’s first painting sets up a satirical tone: English Painting, 2023, simply offers these two white cursive words on a black ground. It’s a wry introduction to an exhibition that channels David Bowie as Lytton Strachey (as painted by Henry Lamb in 1914) and samples King Arthur (modelled on William Morris) from Edward Burne-Jones’s epic painting The Last Sleep of Arthur at Avalon, 1881–98. Landscape, 2023, presents an English pastoral scene, à la Thomas Gainsborough, into which pokes a leg wearing a period white stocking and a pointy black buckled shoe. Portrait, 2023, shows a man hefting a shotgun, wearing a black neckerchief and a touch of menace, all rendered in a Frank Auerbach-like impasto. But the apex of colonial, aristocratic power comes crashing down in Bloody Sunday, 2023. Here, against a ground of pale orange, a bunch of dark green numbers appear on a zebra crossing. There’s a flash of Abbey Road, until you realise that the numbers are piling up, their edges softened to make them seem more human. Provoked by the 50th anniversary of the killings of 13 civilians in Derry by the British Army, Dalwood’s tricolour image radiates illegibility: it’s hard to read, because few want to read it. It emits a similar, stark painfulness as his Death of David Kelly painting from 2008 (Interview AM425).

Numbers coalesce and float free of coherent dates in several other paintings. In The Blitz, 2024, the blackand- red numerals 4–1–9–0 march horizontally and inexorably across a green ground over ghosted rectangles of grey. Two framed paintings lean partially out of sight. Although inspired by the emptying of the National Gallery during the Second World War, Dalwood suggestively questions who decides which works are treasured and displayed; the precariousness of taste, aesthetic values and material accumulation; and the digital threat to painting. In another typical Dalwoodian layer, I discover that the elegant 1930s font was once used by Lyons’ coffeehouses and later taken up by the National Socialists – who certainly knew how to make numbers vanish. Dalwood also remixes his musical past in Punk is Dead, 2023, where the red Roxy sign slides somewhere between a black window and a green mirror, into evaporation. Northern Pop, 2023, salutes Jasper Johns’s grisaille checkerboard where abbreviations of northern counties are embossed in black oil and twilight puddles on a grey wintry street. These paintings are too generative, however, to be nostalgic. There’s too much irony and stealing for that. These are determinedly anti-sentimental remnants.

Is there a place for the dandy in geometric grid painting? In Languid Ziggy, 2023, Dalwood believes so. Bowie may be slightly off stage, but his presence radiates out and upwards. This is an exquisite portrait made of the soft danger brought by something new, an encounter that pulls you in like a sound wave, a dream or a trip. Then there is what could be dubbed future channelling in White Out, 2024. Reminiscent of Dalwood’s earlier paintings set in cars and aeroplanes, a sleek white car door opens onto a white plain where Stonehenge merges with mist. In our drive-by culture, we don’t need to leave the car to snap the monument. How can things move us if we are always moving? Dalwood conveys the speed of the evolution of looking, in which we care less and less what the gaze absorbs. We skim. We scan. Stonehenge will become a hologram. This show could have been called ‘English Belonging’. Or ‘Belongings’. Or ‘Longing’, but it could only have been conceived from far away.