Sorcha Dallas

It recently occurred to Henry Coombes, that the black button referred to in the exhibition title could be the metaphorical one that any artist can choose to press, on making the choice to eschew external issues and access the darker recesses of the psyche. It seems fitting that the first sculpture the gallery goer encounters, ‘Inside Kenneth’s Mind (A Beautiful Silent Man)’, demonstrates this, with a small but powerful figurative explosion forcing its way from the interior, out of the empty orbs and jaw of the skull. The choice of only one piece for the Upper Foyer Gallery space is a conscious one made by the artist, on thinking about a Giacommeti exhibition where one small sculpture was placed alone in a huge gallery. This also frames the consideration that this is intended as an exhibition of singular works, offering the possibility and space for us to look at and consider each contained, framed piece and the luminous world locked within the medium on its own merits, rather than necessitating the desire that it must be viewed as part of a whole to unlock any meaning.

Coombes’ process of making is an intensely private one. In a recent artist statement he acknowledges the difficult nature of this act: ”Making becomes the stage for a one-man performance to an audience of one, where the act of making lets in the emotive forces that I must obey, or avoid like a coward and pay the price with a sick burp of mediocrity and a wretch of guilt onto my pale knees; every day I am in the studio covered by this bile’.

Coombes’ work previously focused on an exploration of symbols of an upper-class upbringing, forming an idiosyncratic journey redolent with political, cultural and class connotations. Whilst these emblems are still apparent, through an interrogation of his own practice, Coombes has latterly increasingly let the nature of the mediums he uses dictate the narratives that appear. In ‘The Water Diviner’, for example, a spillage of pigment on paper became a kingfisher that if held by its long beak will flap when approaching water.

In ‘Black Button’ there is a vigorous convergence of associations and medium - the day the work was made, everyday incidents, the artist’s childhood, an appreciation of the technique and symbolism of Old Masters and most definitely a predilection towards the macabre, pathos and comedy. ‘The Last Sausage, and Something I Wouldn’t Normally Touch’ took shape out of the consideration of a pair of figures in a Goya painting. When the dynamic did not look right with the second figure standing on a pedestal, the body was deflated and speared onto a skewer as Coombes happened to be avoiding going to a barbeque to finish making the work. Furthermore, the making of these exhibited watercolours often occurred far from any formal studio situation. ‘Do Not Pick Me From the Crowd’ was painted when Coombes was stuck for a day in Madrid Airport waiting on a delayed flight, whilst a number of the works were painted in a hotel room in LA while he was facing up to isolation on a month long residency.

In this skewed collusion of medium, narrative and situation, the work ultimately attempts to trap ‘grotesque truths’. Coombes defines this as, ‘the truths that evade us everyday – they dance with an eager energy that skips and jerks around conclusion and opinion and the vile habit of summary’.