It's Really Like That: Will Harman, Jen Roper, Paula Parole, Bliss Coulthard

It’s Really Like That reveres the awkward, crude and comedic aspects of the everyday, with participating artists demonstrating an ability to confront and confess in equal measure. Whether found in the razor-sharp treatment of ‘lad’ culture in football or introspective portraits that reveal interpersonal dynamics, each painter’s visual language bears the authenticity of a diarist. Whilst each artists draws upon personal experience, the fallibility of memory supervenes on observation: playful touches of the surreal and exaggerated run throughout. The exhibition beckons visitors to laugh, cringe and emote: to be unapologetic and unembarrassed by the less than perfect parts of our experience.

 

Philosophers and sociologists have determined that autobiography, or confession, is a prevailing characteristic of Modernity: Michel Foucault asserted that 'Western man has become a confessing animal'. Extending into visual culture, self-disclosure and stylisation of one's image is now ubiquitous through digital means. For artists in It's Really Like That, autobiographical narratives are told in highly idiosyncratic ways. 

 

Will Harman is simultaneously within and outside social situations he observes, probing weighty concepts of Britishness and toxic masculinity through a light-hearted visual lexicon. Though undeniably contemporary, not even historical events are exempt from his acerbic wit, as the Battle of Waterloo is rendered in caricature. Playful observation is also manifest in the works of Jen Roper’s large-scale canvases that fully immerse us in embarrassing everyday encounters. Roper not only draws from experience, but is an ever-present protagonist within her scenes, relieving the ‘burden’ of awkwardness for the viewer. At once tender and astute, Paula Parole harnesses the same humour through poetic means, dissecting romantic relationships and notions of womanhood through the tradition of auto-theory. Memory is similarly at the core of Bliss Coulthard's practice: her expressive and intimate watercolour scenes unravel the complexities of recollection and identity.