Anthony Banks: Slow Service
4th February - 6th March 2022
at RO Frames, Stroud
Photographs by Hatty Frances Bell
As with all of Banks’ work, these paintings have been in progress for a period of several years (2018 - 2022). For Banks, the slowness of his painting is purposeful; a subversive gesture against the lightning-speed production that is now expected of contemporary culture. Banks’ protracted production is a firm and polite refusal, in the manner of Herman Melville’s character Bartleby who says: “I would prefer not to”.
Banks’ deliberate stoppage isn’t limited to the time a painting spends in the studio but continues into the gallery. His finished pieces are somehow suspended in a seemingly unstable state of oscillation between figuration and abstraction, his subjects eluding immediate recognition yet hiding in plain sight. In their making his canvases are layered, pared back, over painted, cropped, framed, stretched and un-stretched before their final form is settled.
Banks strikes a delicate balance in allowing room for the viewer to arrive at their own interpretation whilst also providing sufficient visual cues within the frame for his subjects to slowly appear, like a light-leaked photograph or a patchy memory.
