One of the more interesting ironies about modernity, specifically in respect to visual art, is that often one of the most accurate indices of a work’s contemporaneity is the degree to which it successfully rearticulates positions and techniques originating in the past. Before the western tradition developed a schema for the naturalistic rendering of objects within space, the elements making up a painting’s narrative – a diadem or a tabletop for example, were depicted singularly as was the area surrounding them. On the basis of the similarities between this process and the way in which Photoshop and other digital imaging programs work by allowing for the isolation from the overall picture space of an object and its immediate environment it is possible to argue that the recent work of David Eastwood has aspects that are both inside and outside their time.

The works of which I write have a strong sense of pattern and heightened optical effect evidencing as much a debt to Bridget Riley as they do to the fabrics and wallpapers of the 1970s. These paintings are characterised by a light source that is generally consistent across their surface working to naturalize and coagulate the disparate elements – a plastic IKEA chair, wallpaper derived from Vermeer or the carpet from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining within the apertureless and theatricalised space that is quite possibly more stage than canvas. In these works David Eastwood is as much director as painter. The furniture with its eerie sentience has a disquieting aspect that is best understood by reference to the term character actor. As do other various objects, which, like everything else in this series of paintings, are meticulously rendered in a halo of fictive space that Eastwood uses to quarantine his actors.

It is the discourse between these hitherto mute objects that links these paintings with current Mise en scène strategies. For Eastwood the pictorial space of the canvas has become a theatre set, a site of action, a rhetorical space where a sort of static, ritualised drama is staged. In these new works a formal and conceptual approach is emerging that has affinities with the theory and practice of cinema and the theatre. It is a new direction for Eastwood. The artist as director interestingly enough has its origins, as does single point perspective, in the early renaissance, when artists elaborated pageants and other forms of spectacle that were – as are the recent works of David Eastwood – complexly coded, often oblique, associative narratives.

Gary Carsley, October 2007