Tom Jean Webb: Fighting order to find landscape
At Brooke Benington gallery, London, UK artist now in the US, Tom Jean Webb, looks through a domestic window to see a world of seeming disorder. Once there, as Will Jennings discovers, there is a new kind of order.
When Gregor Samsa fell asleep, he didn’t expect to wake up transformed into an insect, and was in no way ready for his existential Metamorphosis drama. He almost certainly didn’t expect Franz Kafka to document the trauma and turn his reality into a drama, and for his embarrassing insect-situation to become a cultural shorthand for anxiety, angst, anti-capitalist longings of freedom, or psychological analysis. Yet, it offers a canvas for all these, and more.
The first room of Tom Jean Webb’s paintings at Brooke Benington, London, also invite such animalistic renderings. One, Our leading light (2023) focuses on a moth crawling up a wall towards a light switch – it is either oversized or the architecture it finds itself within has become doll’s house in scale, perhaps this moth is a Samsor-like transmogrification reaching towards the last human-scale button that might illuminate their situation.
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March 18, 2024
