We’ve all been so bored we’d watched paint dry, but English artist David Micheaud asks what happens if you push beyond that point; what happens when the paint’s dry but there’s still nothing left to do, and the walls start closing in on you.
The show is full of uncomfortably precise interiors and still lifes; bare, minimal, crisp, hyper-real visions of a coat on its hook, feet up on a table, a hob, an intercom, the shadow cast by a cheese plant.
Nothing happens, there’s no action, no big gestures or emotions, there’s just the blank reality of the stuff of everyday life, stared at for so long that it’s no longer comforting, it’s suffocating, overbearing.
They’re gorgeous paintings, perfectly rendered. You become hypnotised by the shadows of the intercom handset, the weird sci fi landscape of the hob, the undulating pleats of the coat. It’s totally, utterly fetishistic in its finishing, its gloss, its obsessive precision.
In all its cool aloofness it’s like Alex Katz with no people, Vilhelm Hammershoi bored off his nut, Ed Ruscha stuck in a south London flat, staring at the walls, cleaning the hob, waiting for someone, anyone, to buzz the intercom and break the monotony. But at the same time, it’s obvious that the monotony isn’t a bad thing for Micheaud, that he likes it, loves it, revels in it. Because via the monotony, he manages to lose himself in the uncanny valley of existence, the erotic of the everyday, the tense sensuality of the unbearably mundane. It’s uncomfortable and strange, but a lot better than having to watch paint dry.