On entering Caragh Thuring’s exhibition, you’re confronted by the back of an enormous painting suspended from the ceiling and half-blocking the doorway. And that’s actually a nice metaphor for Thuring’s work as a whole – her way of deconstructing the elements of a scene, of playing with ideas of display, inversion and interruption, to create something starkly discombobulating.
Many of the London-based artist’s paintings seem to depict different viewpoints or angles simultaneously – snippets of interiors and quick sketches of furniture or vases. There are also hints of external brickwork and garden plants, so you’re never entirely sure whether the view is from inside a room looking out or from outside looking in. Rectangles appear, framing other scenes, yet it’s hard to assess whether these represent windows or other paintings. And different painting styles constantly clash and overlap, turning the visual space into something choppy and indeterminate with objects that could be in front of or behind other objects, or that can’t be distinguished from reflections and shadows on walls, or that jar against more abstract and diagrammatic sections.
Throughout, the sense you get is one of delirious fragmentation, of multiple visual registers colliding and collapsing. It’s a nod, perhaps, towards the chaos and uncertainty of the internet age. Occasionally, Thuring’s cut-and-paste-style surfaces feel slightly too schematic – as when she depicts images of models taken from magazine adverts, their skin painted in a brickwork pattern. But for the most part, the confusions of her work are unsettling and richly rewarding.
Gabriel Coxhead