In his first solo exhibition in the UK, emerging British artist and winner of the East London painting prize Nathan Eastwood (b. 1972) meticulously makes black and white paintings using humbrol enamel paint on board. The enamel paint has a direct relationship to the subjects painted domestic and its use on radiators or skirting boards.

 

During Nathan’s Masters Degree his art practice went through an operation of purging.  He reduced the painting practice down to the monochromatic object. He often states that ‘I had become a reductive painter and that I wanted to purge my paintings from reference to the real world and start from zero position’. He became very interested in the minimalist project.

 

The structure and alignment between the painted object and the verticality and horizontality of the gallery horizon became of interest to the painter.  ‘Measurement became the aesthetic tool in which he was able to operate within’. Nevertheless the artist came to a point where he believed that this artistic practice delimited its own future possibility. Through the months of 2010 the artist went through a stage of reflection.  A dilemma surfaced. How could, he extend his interests in minimalist and reductionist aesthetic, but avoid burying himself in an overtly academic painting and dependent on the exhibition space?  This conceptual and material dilemma required a re-invention.

 

The artist had stated that his objective was to reintroduce the representational image with the view to continue with a minimal aesthetic.

The return to the real has become his on-going objective; combining the reductionist aesthetic, and the real world of signs. Nathan ‘says the real here being life and my immediate surroundings, both domestic interior and the public (common) spaces’.  The paintings have become allegorical for the domestic and public common space.