Robert Sandelson
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P.J.Crook
- Additional Information -
The paintings of P. J. Crook have a surreal touch, a haunting quality. Her protagonists seem suspended in time and motion like figures from a dream, even though they inhabit familiar settings such as living rooms, gardens, racecourses and restaurants. Her world is one of an ever present uncertainty, and it is her ability to make this seem as convincing as the ‘real’ world that gives her paintings their great power to get under the skin. There is a particular quality in English art which can take seemingly ordinary people and situations and reveal them into special, strange happenings. Hogarth, Spencer and Weight have this quality in painting, as do Shakespeare and Dickens in literature. They hold a mirror to our world and help us see beyond the commonplace. The paintings of P J Crook invite us to share a similar exploration.
P J Crook’s paintings demand to be part of our space, mentally and physically. Her device of carrying the painting onto the specially constructed frames acts as a way of inviting us into the world of the painting and of extending the painting out into our environment. In this exhibition there are paintings on corrugated surfaces whose appearance changes with our point of view and others where elements within the picture extend out as if to emphasise the reality of the world of the painting. Like Carrol’s Alice we pass between our world and the P J Crook world, which holds a mirror up to our preoccupations and makes them special.
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