In his INTRODUCTION to the catalogue for my last show, John Russell Taylor described my work as Magic Realism. It's a term that's more often used these days to describe a genre of literature with a supernatural dimension - often darkly comic - dealing with themes such as love, grief and obsession. Given this definition, it could be reasonably applied to the work in this show. READ MORE

Continued from above...

These paintings are set in six different areas of London: Tower Bridge, Bankside, The South Bank, Mudchute and Crossharbour (two Docklands backwaters) and Exchange Square, a development behind Liverpool Street Station. The places are recognizable to some extent but my versions of them blend fact and fiction. I've been raiding the contents of London's museums and distributing them around town to various ends. For instance, Bankside lV and Mudchute ll use a tiny ivory carving by Pisano in the Victoria & Albert collection. The damaged head in Southbank l is an ancient fragment from the British Museum. The sculpture that appears in Tower Bridge l, on the other hand, is based on a more recent work by Edoardo Paolozzi which has been dragged a few hundred yards up the Thames Path and re-sited at the foot of the bridge.

The light in these pictures, if not magical, is certainly unearthly and bears little relation to any quality of light you would come across wandering the streets of London. Their spatial qualities vary widely. I'm interested in the point where the logic of perspective breaks down and some of these paintings go far beyond that point using tilting and rotating viewpoints to create an unsettling or disorientating effect. Others employ simple one-point perspectives and are, by comparison calm and detached.

I continue to look for innovation within traditions that have been largely ignored for generations. I've long felt that the avantgarde had become a bit of a travesty since being adopted as the house style of the contemporary art establishment. This attitude is reflected in the work which explores what you might call 'pre-Modern'  or - if it wasn't such a mouthful - post-avantgarde aesthetics.

David Piddock