Rata tat tat
Music flows through Paul Saint's exhibition Rat a tat tat, but it is not the art/rock crossover stuff of many of his contemporaries. This is a more eclectic beast altogether. Saint samples history, pop culture, materials, politics and gossip like a master DJ in this group of paintings which are hung in a row around the gallery, humming on the wall with nervous energy. As in jazz or hip-hop, Saint uses a base structure and builds on it, with thirty-four small canvases of identical size riffing on the potential of painting to contain and convey meaning, their myriad signs building one upon the other in jittery, syncopated loops. Across the room are hung a row of prints, relief printed direct from vinyl records. On each, the central label contains a loaded symbol: a peace sign, a smiley face, a swastika, a hammer and sickle.
Viewed as a suite, the works provide a dense if open-ended barrage of information. Exhibited shortly after September 11, the quasi-nationalistic and military imagery in many of the works (produced some time before the event) attained an element of urgency that at times confused the subtlety of Saint's project. In Seeing forever on a clear day, the shape of the double-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, appropriated from the Albanian flag, floats within a graded blue ground. Albania, the poorest country in Europe, still retains this grandiose symbol of past glories; here Saint has cut the emblem from a tea towel, rendering it ridiculous and set adrift against an endless blue sky. lt is also, though, a strange and beautiful image. In other works, iron crosses, discs and stars (as well as a Zapatista mustache)