Art

This two-hander, entitled ‘Bierstadt’, is an exercise in hanging out on paper; there are no deep and meaningfuls about the nature of collaborating in McDevitt and Quabeck’s occasional artistic relationship. One snail mails the other a bit of a drawing or a painting and, wherever they are in the world, the other responds à la ‘Exquisite Corpse’, the old French surrealists’ parlour game of to and fro. It’s tempting to read one scrawling the words ‘My life is shit! What am I doing?’ over the other’s neatly worked pencil drawing as some kind of vandalistic one-upmanship, but it comes across more as an artistic bromance or buddy movie, with their equivalents of fratboy plotlines being heavy drinking, face-melting self-portraits and the occasional willy.

This could all smack of a lonely night in with a pen or more of the well-trammelled postal art route, but guessing who is responsible for what – McDevitt is the more accurate, linear draughtsman, while Quabeck is the splodgier, perhaps ballsier of the two – is engaging enough. The haphazard nature of these shared activities is neatly summarised in a scrunched-up drawing and in overlapping stacks of paintings that obliterate each previous image, but still the feel is of beer-mat doodling.

A slapdash secret hatch to a backroom (pictured) reveals the artists as individuals, with McDevitt’s etchings of cartoonish, pukey fountains aching to be three-dimensionalised and only two decent paintings by the perennially uneven Quabeck. Think of it as a lads’ night out: messy, drunken and juvenile, but – in parts at least – fuzzily memorable.