Lucinda Metcalfe. Open Sky

"After the line of the visible horizon, the square horizon of the screen will emerge". Paul Virilio, Open Sky.

'Open Sky' is an exhibition that started with a small painting. The title is derived from a book by Paul Virilio which talks of the instantaneous transmission of a digital age and the loss of real places and the loss of the present. P26. "While the topical city was once constructed around the 'gate' and the 'port', the teletopical meta city is now reconstructed around the 'window' and the teleport, that is to say, around the screen and the time slot. "He expresses a kind of disorientation, a confusion and 'pollution' of distances and a degrading of our relationship with our environment, where 'the image prevails over the thing it is an image of'. The travel advertisement image is often the subject of Lucinda's work and it is the excess of images, of places we should desire, that the artist has found her subject.

Filling an entire wall in the show Lucinda has created a grouping of paintings suggesting this over saturation of the image in contemporary society. These images all promise something, yet fail to deliver, like the advertisements which inspired them and on which they're based. The sky could be perceived as both open and closed. The show's title suggests an open place, the hope of wide open spaces and freedom, and these scenes depicted invite this reading. But they also confuse the distinction, both through their intensity and the apparent closeness of the sky. In its density, the sky could seem to depict a wall, not a real sky.

Contrasted with this wall of excess, Lucinda will display her large piece 'Pink Wall', which offers up a theatrical space where everything seems to have stopped, the wall appears as a screen, which has become over saturated perhaps with information, and offers us no images, just the reality of the two dimensional space. The non illusionistic space of the screen as object which then seems to stand in-between us and the reality beyond, a frustration, a blockage, which confronts us.

In her paintings, Lucinda shows up the screen for what it is, a two dimensional surface into which, or from which the world is transmitted. In her work we see instead the screen at the moment of of saturation or reality, where the images stop and we just see a blank wall. The intense fluorescent red that runs through Lucinda's work emphasises the artificiality of the screen, the space through which we increasingly interact and face the world.