That eighth or ninth drink of the night just goes right through you, and all the girls in Lily Bunney’s paintings have broken the seal. The young London-based artist’s show is filled with pointillist watercolours of girls crouching down between parked cars to have a slash, girls caught short on their way back from a night out while their pals capture their vulnerable pants-down ablutions on smartphones or disposable cameras. You can almost hear the giggling.
It’s meant to be an ode to friendship; these paintings, based on found imagery, are rude, crude, lewd pixelated depictions of the last gasps of partying. They’re half-paparazzi snaps, half-private photos of drunken togetherness and youthful glee, and they’re good, interesting, clever paintings.
The rest of the works are photos of the artist and their friends remade out of beads, memories rendered as teenage hobby crafts.
These paintings feel tinged with sadness to me because I know these times can’t last. Soon, work will get too busy, the hangovers will hurt too much, nights out with your mates will get rainchecked into oblivion. The nights of getting so hammered you and all your pals have to piss behind a car are numbered. Either that or you do it into your 40s or 50s, and then it’s not cute anymore: it’s not fun, it’s just sad.
Maybe Bunney feels the same way, maybe she knows it’s coming, maybe this is proto-nostalgic pissy pointillism.
It might be the soundtrack of sad-girl-emo-folk playing in the gallery, but I was genuinely moved by the show. I felt sad about my friends I haven’t seen for too long, the loss of my 20s, the carefree days of pints and partying. I’m off to piss behind a car, just for old time’s sake.