A teenage guitarist waits for his audience, a gardener waits for his produce to grow, an empty trophy cabinet waits for its trophies. English painter Gareth Cadwallader’s work (last seen in the Hayward’s big ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’ exhibition in 2021) is full of anticipation.
But this isn’t eager anticipation, this is where excitement has tipped over into boredom, and now sits on the precipice of disappointment. Will that produce ever grow, will that audience ever show up, will any trophies ever be won? It feels somehow unlikely.
Cadwallader works on a small scale, reworking each canvas over a period of years. It gives his show a monastic, obsessive quality. Each tiny painting is given its own wall, a vast space to contemplate its little universe of infinite details and unfollowable references with the same kind of semi-religious fervour the work was created with.
You’re left with a sense of unsatisfiable anticipation
The exhibition opens with a father showing his son a starfish.The treeline in the distance swirls with oil slick colours and twisting shapes. The father’s shirt is a concertina of blue lines, millions of shapes flowing into one another. The work is so minutely detailed that you search it for hidden meaning, seeking symbols, words, numbers in the patterns. In the next work, an old man is having his beard trimmed; is this the same father and son duo as before, but older now? The old man is frail and aged, the younger man is mature and confident. Time has passed, life has happened.
Other works here are filled with dark organic shapes, vines that curl forever, knots of wood, weeds, phantasmal plants that leave their ectoplasmic marks across each canvas. There’s a teenage boy sitting with drumsticks but no drum kit, a kid hunched over his guitar in the shed. There’s no specific narrative here, instead you’re left with a sense of unsatisfiable anticipation, that something is meant to happen, maybe something important, but in the meantime the clock just keeps ticking.
These are incredibly beautiful paintings that – to me, at least – feel achingly sad, filled with longing, maybe for lost youth, maybe for something else. This a plea to live, to do, to feel, because otherwise, life might just pass you by.
