What interests me and why I agreed to open this exhibition is because of Matt Palmer’s ability to stand outside his chosen career path and try to decipher its context. To ask what is below the surface and the need to deepen and reconcile his experience within the advertising construct.

The images that surround us here are Matt Palmer’s attempt to understand the culture in which we all live. The cluttered space of popular culture, where codes of music, photography and language seek to control individually.

Matt Palmer turns these forms back in on themselves to create ghostly and mysterious portraiture. The images at once seem familiar and yet unknowable and out of reach. They trigger a memory, a feeling and recognition.

These images are taken from our ubiquitous cultural landscape. We ask ourselves who is that, almost like looking at a celebrity magazine or did I see that person on the OC or Big Brother. One frame taken from literally millions consumed daily. Here in this room Matt Palmer asks us to stop a moment and consider ourselves and where the individual fits.

They leave open a space for our own experience our own interpretation, we can project ourselves into the canvas. Standing in front of one of Matt Palmers paintings is to remember a moment, a feeling an experience. But to question was it real or imagined.

At what point do we really experience our own feelings and at what point are lives mediated by a constructed world of demographic cultural hyper reality.

Palmer’s images suggest how we personalize, popular culture attaching our own experiences and memories.

But at the heart of Palmer’s work is the pursuit of an unlikely beauty, not a beauty of perfection but one bourne from vulnerability and uncertainty.

His use of colour and composition display an unnerving confidence, but the lack of perfection on the surface and edges suggest an insecurity, fallibility

A rupture in the narrative, a crack in the mirror.

His works are paintings in all but technique and they are like well crafted pop songs and the subject matter often travels the same territory as they waver between confidence, anxiety, relationships and self obsession. But this vulnerability is not merely superficial; it is convincingly conveyed by the twilight world they inhabit. A world of knowing but not understanding, a world of confusion, sadness, danger and expectation.

Palmer does not provide an answer in these works. But they do reflect the anticipated thoughts and feelings we may have already had, there condensed quality suggest a narrative outside the depicted moment as if they are on pause in a sequence of events.

But it is the emotional content that drives the narrative in these images. In looking closely the works here move from exploring how we experience a sense of self, to reflecting our anxieties about our relationships with ourself and others. The works are imbued with the fears and pleasures that characterize contemporary life.

James Marshall 06