PRESS RELEASE - Silent Pictures of the Inner City
It's striking what David Browne leaves out of his beautifully painted watercolours of urban streetscapes. Like the photographer Eugene Atget, who photographed a strangely deserted Paris (“like a crime scene” as one commentator noted), he leaves out people. He also leaves out almost everything else we expect of paintings of cities; that is, recognisable landmarks, handsome buildings, vistas. Instead, he prowls the alleys and backways, the tight haphazard functional spaces that evolve behind the planned facades.
And the spaces he depicts are rigorously functional. Everything does a job, everything is just what it has to be and no more. Bare walls, concrete courtyards, steel gates. Buildings piled up against the other in a jumble of rooftops. Though there are no people, these worn environments are worn primarily through use, through the inexorable daily grind, but also by time and the weather. The signs are there in the battered surfaces, the peeling paint, the rusted metal and the way colour has been largely washed out of the picture: often they are close to monochrome.
It should be very bleak and in a way it is. This is the underside of the city, after all. Yet out of it emerges an unexpected poetry. This has perhaps to do with the way, as in Edward Hopper’s paintings, light defines space and gives it a kind of grace. The world of surfaces, angles and textures is almost abstract but also entirely familiar, a landscape that we know intimately, one in which, probably without being particularly conscious of it, we are at home.
Aidan Dunne