David Gledhill

GREAT big abstracts have been a common sight in galleries and museums for 50 years. Huge, neck twisting pictures that engulf you.

You don't so much look at them as lose yourself in the colour and action. But as abstraction itself has taught us, there are no individual aspects of painting that are totally indispensable.

Phil Rowe's new work in the Bassoon Club at Tmesis shows us that success can consist as much in the rejection of precedent as in the development of a productive working practice.

These untitled, diminutive, folded and painted fragments applied directly to the gallery wall possess an intimacy and integrity that shames the florid grandstanding of much current painting. Scale has always been a vexed issue in art and whilst many of these tiny works could stand transcription into wall-sized epics, looking at this show convinces you that if something functions, it functions in the mind regardless of its size.

'Pocket' absorbs and rewards scrutiny with a poetry and wit that is aesthetically literate and yet entirely fresh and unprepossessing. One piece, a red-dabbed padded envelope reminds us that a simple amendment to the heaps of stuff that litter our lives can reinvest it with enigma and magic.

Unframed, oddly shaped and quirky, this sequence of meditations on the minimum requirement, turns out to be a triumph of understatement. Whilst anthologising most of the major developments in non-figuration, this show gives us something more, the unmistakeable thrill of innovation.

Phil Rowe: Pocket is at Tmesis Gallery until Friday, February 14.

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