4 paintings from a couple of years ago by Shaan Syed at Vardaxaglou

Great, worked surfaces holding a taught line between the sophistication of painting as a endlessly delightful accretion of scrapes, flourishes, wipes, dribbles, etc, and painting as a space to consider complicated ideas - personal identities, historic political injustices.

Shaan seems to paint in the full knowledge that paintings can’t quite handle either of these positions completely or comprehensively, but that painting’s ability to encode each action or intent with the ghost of its opposite (the banality of facility, the rootlessness of language, etc) is why we use paintings (in the making of, and in the looking at) as a space to think about how strange and compelling paint matter is (colour, edges, speeds, viscosities, transparencies, etc) in a way that we don’t find such reward in the surfaces and facture of other objects, at the same time as we attempt an uncertain consideration of why we ‘like’ certain visual attributes or conventions, and what ‘liking’ says about us in relation to how and why those things were made, and whether in the painting-making, while thinking about the cultural signifier or motif, the painting might itself bear traces of the person of the painter at the time of their act of painting - their anger, frustration, confidence, uncertainty, playfulness, etc.

These paintings seem to delight in the awkwardness of enjoyment, both in making and looking.