SANITY PROJECT – MARCUS FREEMAN PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS

Marcus Freeman’s work is principally acrylic paintings of buildings, or ‘urban landscapes’ as he prefers to think of them: ‘I always think of myself as a landscape painter, but we are not a rural society anymore’. Freeman’s subjects are rendered with graphic clarity in broad slabs of colour that emphasise and transcend their often unremarkable utilitarian nature. Characterised by long shadows – cast as if by a nuclear flash – his scenes offer a stark account of these fundamentallyhuman-made forms; the cuboid is mankind’s building block (and, perhaps, a distinctly male one).

In part, the work treats these basic volumes, and their pitched roofs, purely formally. Aesthetically, they are exercises in breaking up the picture plane, in drawing the viewer in through their three-dimensional weight; their ‘basic mass’ clearly holds enormous appeal for the artist, with only the occasional curve or plough line allowed to break the tension.Yet their pitiless depiction also lends them a peculiar sorrow. The isolated forms appear thrust from the parched ground like tombstones or forgotten monuments, but with none of the romance of ruin. The only texture or patina offered is that inherent in the materials themselves: the weave of the canvas, the subtle ridge where two blocks of colour meet. Nothing is allowed to charm or distract that is not intrinsic to the form or to the discipline of the chosen medium.

This contrast – between a distinctly twentieth-century language of ‘progress’ and an atmosphere poised between emptiness and dread – captures something widely felt about our current direction of travel, and our dwindling faith yet continued investment in everything from institutions to our increasingly urban or digital modes of existence. ‘Remote’ in a sense far removed from our near-forgotten pastoral way of life.

The graphite drawings included in The Sanity Project extend these concerns to a broader and more eclectic range of subjects. Where the paintings refuse incident, the graphite allows it to emerge, its tonal variations introducing a patina otherwise absent in his paintings. In this sense, the paintings deny time, while the drawings cautiously reintroduce it. In dragging the graphite over the paper with different intensities, Freeman arrives at effects that are inherently unpredictable yet still resist decoration or the indulgence of the particular over the general or archetype.