Light In Painting

Cezanne, even before you open the fine catalogue, metaphorically opens the door on this exhibition of the paired paintings of…

Cezanne, even before you open the fine catalogue, metaphorically opens the door on this exhibition of the paired paintings of the post-impressionist representational artist Stephen McKenna and the Korean abstractionist Chung Eun Mo. For here is McKenna painting the sun's colour as it falls on the Receding Trees and the terracotta tiles of the Tuscan Stable roof, the juxtaposition of structural planes inviting you into the warm and beautiful south. Here too in Chung's work of abstracts, where segments and rectangles intercut, the not dissimilar planes recede and project. McKenna's Italian colours are, as you would expect, the rural greyed greens and dusty oranges. Chung, now living in Italy, borrows more from Roman interiors in form and architectural structure, choosing the blue of tiles, the yellow of frescoes, as if re-working an image of light shafting into a great cool dark in classical interior.

How clever you think of the eponymous Jamshid Mirfendersky to reveal to you the link between both artists, not as a trick, nor a slight of hand, but as a demonstrable sharing of a pleasure he hopes will be our mutual friend: Chung seeking an inner calm through abstraction, McKenna finding it, like Cezanne, in the optimism and insubstantiality formed in the haze of morning's light, or in its counterpart, a northern beam illuminating Three Mackerel, cleaned and smoked.

Runs till October 30th.