Displacement Activity :: Sam Hewitt :: Pop Gallery Brighton :: 15-29 Sept 22
Sam Hewitt is showing new paintings at Pop Gallery Brighton (ex Dynamite) to Thursday 29 September. BraveAdmin posted this response to the show.
I feel familiar with Sam’s paintings of groups of people viewed from above, such as “Between the Bars” (left): small figures move through public spaces, on their way to somewhere else. The colours are warm, purples and oranges, but the figures seem disconnected from the smooth, colour field, and disconnected from each other, as they make their way through the bright, empty space, casting shadows taller than themselves.
Peering closer, I can see individuals, moments of expression and gesture, and details of clothing minutely observed and deftly transferred to canvas with an expressive, gestural fluency of painting. The variety and candor of the humanity on display makes me think the art must be painted from photographic observation, maybe viewed from a balcony overlooking a seafront promenade.
The figures form a crowd, a group of disconnected individuals each going their own way. Until we look closer, and we see they all relate to each other somehow. Some hold hands. One tall, one short. One is fashionable, one dowdy. One is caught in a moment of clumsiness, another looks on. One even catches the eye of the audience – the onlooker, the viewer of the art, the voyeur – and nods in greeting.
None of the figures is prominent. But all are worthy of focus. And all have relationship to each other. They are all parts of a whole, and, together, make up the expression of the whole: after all, we are all connected.
The new show – Sam’s first after lockdown – remains concerned with groups of individuals, and their connectedness.
In some, like “The Dream” (below) the viewpoint is different. Instead of looking down on the crowd, we are at their level, among them.
And, it seems, we can see into them, through them – and it seems we can see the stuff beneath, that connects them, that makes us one.
Displacement Activity is at Pop Gallery which has taken over the premises of the old Dynamite Gallery at 13 Trafalgar Street, Brighton BN1 4EQ.
For more of Sam’s work, go to: http://samhewittpaintings.com/
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