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Despite its dry title Abstract Painting Show, the viewer may experience Peter Alwast's recent exhibition as an 'abstract painting freak show'. The lumpy, slimy and puffy surfaces of the twelve paintings lured one toward them in an odd way which perhaps resembled the desire to see or know 'gory details' of human bodily deformity or injury, while also being aware that it is repulsive. This seemingly psychological lure/repulse action was also reflected in viewers' rather awkward back and forth bodily movements near Alwast's paintings. Unlike abstract painting, which capitalises on visually illusionistic techniques, supposing a comfortable viewing position, Alwast 's work attempts to emphasise an inseparable relationship in art between a sublime or metaphysical illusion and a corporeal experience of artifice.
In Alwast's work the artifice involved in the activity of painting may be compared to a biological experiment. There seemed to be a number of different 'species' of abstract painting in this exhibition, that progress or regress (depending on your inclination) in their treatment of a traditional painting medium such as acrylic on canvas. In Alwast's work, a viewer might imagine this fictitious process of the (de)evolution of painting to have originated, for example, in the aptly titled Abstract Painting (acrylic and pencil on canvas) and (de)evolved through various other forms, to the brilliantly ugly Magic Substance (polyurethane and acrylic on board) which in appearance perhaps represents the most distant cousin of Abstract Painting. The seemingly distant but nonetheless recognisable relationship to abstract painting in some of the works, is emphasised by cliched titles referencing abstract painting and criticism, which may trigger the uncanny feeling of 'having been here before'. This is exemplified further in the titles of