Matthew Krishanu’s work is shrouded in the fog of memory. Across a series of dreamy, washed-out paintings, he digs up his past and recasts it in canvas and paper.
Two boys recur throughout most of the show, the artist and his brother as kids. They sit on boats and horses, swim in rivers and seas, clamber over a Henry Moore sculpture. The works look like family snapshots, faded photos of holidays and daytrips that have been painted from memory. It’s as if painting these moments will somehow bring them back, make them real, permanent.
In the most striking works here the boys sit on the vast drooping branches of a huge banyan tree. They’re dwarfed by it, lost in this enormous symbol of India. The paint is dripping down the canvas, leaching away, the memories are fading.
All this water and greenery is a legacy. In other works his daughter and late wife climb a tree in Epping Forest, or stare out onto an Essex pond. In water and trees is where these memories, these pasts, coalesce into something tangible, long after they’re gone.
The final series of paintings shows Christian churches, priests, nuns and congregations in India and Bangladesh. Krishanu’s mother was a theologian, his father a British missionary. These images are crisper, sharper, firmer than the rest; no fog or haze here, just stark personal history.
There’s a temptation to read the Christian works as a comment on religion as a colonising force, or a kickback against the dominance of the white figure in Christian aesthetics. Maybe, but I'm not sure. Instead, they feel like an extension of Krishanu’s excavation of memory, a way of processing the mental images of his past.
Not all the paintings here are good, some are actually pretty bad, and hazy nostalgic figurative painting has been absolutely everywhere for absolutely ages. But Krishanu’s work is imbued with a deep, soft vulnerability, a tenderness and sadness that just about sets it apart; it’s like watching him trying desperately to hold on to memories, ideas, identities, images that remain, no matter what he does, totally ungraspable.
