Damien Meade, Structure 3, 2014. Oil on linen, 47 x 50 x 2cm. Courtesy: the artist and day01. Gallery, Sydney.

Damien Meade’s paintings are moody, dark, seductive; they have a bulbous voluminosity yet a compression that enables an intriguing perceptual disorientation; their colours are masterful, delicious, and tarred with an old master quality. His busts of genetically related Matriarchal characters share binaries of ancient and modern, dead and alive, surface and illusion. Whilst interrelated, Meade’s abstract surface and structure paintings act as a reminder, in quoting the renowned art historian Hans Belting, that surface leads directly to face, whereby portraiture is a constantly evolving mask in Western Culture.

Well-known for his layered studio-based process, Damien’s domestic and modestly scaled paintings are born through months of clay modelling, photography, digital editing before the artist transforms his fictional subjects into oil paintings. An elegant sampling of clay as base matter, auditioning as high art in evocative provocation. Paintings of a palette that emulate a sensitivity of flesh expressed by gentle bruised highlights of pink and purple.

Constructed in his urban canal-side studio in East London hovering under a skylight that offers divine light just off to the left as it should be. These paintings deserve a ponderous state, the same manner in which they were created.

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