David Gledhill

Wit is a rare commodity in painting, and as Pete and Dud observed, 'there aren't a lot of laughs in Leonardo's cartoon.'

But wit doesn't consist in gags alone. There are other species of humour currently on show at Castlefield Gallery in a double bill that harmonises beautifully.

The post-modern condition has freed up a great many artists to mix and match idioms and the new paintings by Padraig Timoney, in the main space, are playful enough to inspire a sense of gentle mirth.

The incorporation of more or less anything, including rolled up socks, set squares and a mop-head, makes these paintings as like, but unlike, one another as second cousins.

Dating largely from the last two years, and mostly untitled, they evoke a refinement of sensibility behind and beyond their eclecticism, a variousness that can stretch to accommodate both formal clarity, human presence and a zen-like visual poetry.

Modernism

Upstairs in the project space, James Hutchinson presents a greatest hits of western modernism, rendered in greasy budget oils on identical pre-stretched canvases. They're all here, from Hopper to Hume, Picasso to Richter and they all look terrible, as though retrieved from a pile of jigsaws in a charity shop.

Hutchinson has invested precisely the right degree of care(lessness) in these daubs, the point being to drain them of their force as originals, and satirise the canonisation of art through reproduction.

Uncomfortably close to trainspotting, the experience of looking at these images reminds you that histories need regular subversion to sustain meaning.

Padraig Timoney: New Work; and James Hutchinson: Karaoke Paintings
is at Castlefield Gallery, until Sunday, March 30.

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