Christopher Le Brun paints paintings about painting. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he paints paintings that aren’t about anything. He just paints, like ‘I paint therefore I am’ or something. These new abstract works at Lisson Gallery are the result of the current President of the Royal Academy shunning self-reflection on what it means for humans to hold paintbrushes or wittily riffing on some bit of art history. Put another way, it’s like saying: forget the navel-gazing and let’s just paint.
And if the ten large paintings on display here are anything to go by, then it seems like he’s onto something. The downstairs rooms are dominated by works where the surface is like a craggy, weather-beaten rock face.
As with staring up at a monumental piece of chalky cliff, the more you stare – and where you stare at it from – transforms what you see. The icy expanse of ‘True North’ shifts from an appropriately snowy white to pale pink. Then, in ‘Concert’, saturated patches of colour either explode onto the canvas or ripple on it, making this abstract work somehow resemble Monet’s lily pads and van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ at the same time, whilst also looking like something else altogether.
Upstairs, the surfaces become smooth as Krispy Kreme icing, but the flickering colours remain. ‘Lyric’ resembles a close-up of a tulip petal, the rose and cream surface almost translucent and streaked at the base with soft green.
But the absolute glory of this show – and the reason you should drop everything and jump on the tube to Edgware Road – is ‘Rise’. Bit hard to describe in words, this one. I mean, it’s yellow. Or gold. But more than that, it’s like Le Brun has painted light. This is the SAD lamp of paintings, the centre of a star split open on to a canvas.