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  • Barnaby Furnas

  • Until Jul 26
    • Last Chance!
  • This event has finished
  • Stuart Shave Modern Art, 23-25 Eastcastle St, W1W 8DF
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  • By Ossian Ward

    Posted: Wed Jul 16

  • New Yorker Barnaby Furnas has turned his attention away from historic US military figures and war scenes to paint the nearest things to battlefields you can find on American soil: mega-stadia rock gigs. A Slayer concert depicted in retinal-damaging hot-pink hues is riotously illuminated by stabbing spotlights instead of power chords, while repetitive circular speaker cones and spectator heads provide the picture with a kind of rhythm section. The group Bad Brains are shown (too literally) as their heads combust in an explosive display of firework effects and beaming searchlights, while Joy Division are reduced to cubo-constructivist disco-ball men in an amphitheatrical space akin to visual surround sound. These paintings do rock, in the slightly formulaic manner of stadium gigs – they’re spectacular on the night, if unmemorable for all being a bit too alike. There’s obvious joy in all this symmetry and in the details of the seas of lighters and devil’s-horn hand gestures in the crowd, but elsewhere the show hits lots of bum notes.

    He struggles with figures; his ‘Dead Jesus II’ (a redundant-sounding sequel if ever there was one) is little more than a blood-splattered Turin shroud knock-off and only ‘Bad Back’ suggests a more elemental, Philip Guston-style form – too bad the subject appears to be the celebrity-favoured therapy of lumbar-region ‘fire cupping’. Then there is the woeful ‘Flood’ series in which Furnas and friends tilt enormous canvases while pouring red and black paint into waves of blood or apocalyptic menstruations (his allusion, not mine). These huge, empty gestures really are the painterly equivalents of rock-star antics and perhaps Furnas believes his own hype too much by persisting with them. He should leave the dribbling to Pollock and stick to the special effects.

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