Mark Swords latest show at Kevin Kavanagh, according to the blurb: "displays an increasingly intuitive engagement with various approaches to painting and art making." What emerges at the show, rather than a ludic free-wheeling playfulness, rather a wondrous enchantment with a sort of playful dissection. Motifs from manky bits of carpet and fabric are carefully dissected and rearticulated through paint, collage, embroidery etc. A rich awkardness pervades the show, which feels like the perspiration of a painter realising in front of you how tricky the project he has set for himself as he teases out the pictorial strands that comprise the various paintings on show (his literate yet neurotic style also provides a brilliant foil for the few flashes of wanton bravura!)
Mark Swords - CarpetThe first painting that welcomes you obliquely is Carpet, which like all the other pieces on show is of modest size. Riffing on tension between the pattern of a patch of carpet and a Heilmann-esque zig-zagging design, Swords interrelates each element of the painting in such a brittle agitated way, the painting teeters on the brink of resolution and as such provides an excellent point of entry for a show that creates more itches than it scratches.
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