A dialogue between ‘the real’ and the consciously organised artwork can also be seen in the work of Katya Sivers, who deploys fragile materials such as wax, glass, plastics and cloth to construct micro-installations that may be regarded as analogues for the fragility of human society itself – something particularly apt at the present moment as regards relations between Russia and its immediate neighbours. These soft, loose forms are combined with clearly delineated edges, an interplay also suggesting the mutual dependency of diverse constituents within the social and artistic whole.

Lisa Plavinsky occupies a number of different roles, working as a critic and curator whilst, as an artist, she utilises a number of different media, including painting, photography and sound. Part of her work takes up certain conceptual concerns through the use of photographs; as a painter she is especially interested in colour, its removal from the surface of the work as well as its overlays and combinations. If she sometimes provides, in her paintings, a kind of excess or heightened juxtaposition of multiple strands of colour, the opposite might be claimed for Ivan Novikov, whose washes and monochromatic colour planes aim for a reductive palette that is nonetheless saturated and intense. As with several other artists in Taint there is, in Novikov’s practice, a deconstructive or, perhaps more accurately, an expansive aspect to the work, the creation, as it were from the closed field of painting, of installations, the distinct elements of which surround the viewer, implying that he or she may indeed become an actual part of the work.

In erasing the distinction, as far as this is possible, between ideas and their materialisation, Jacopo Trabona obtains and rearranges found functional objects, taking, for example, the separate parts of a piece of home-assembly furniture and putting them together in ways not prescribed by the accompanying instructions. This might be considered a somewhat literal, but nevertheless engaging reinscription of the real, a disruption of expectations in which a useful object begins to function as a composition in its own right. Claire Undy’s photographs also present the viewer with interpretative problems that insist upon a comparison between what is expected or received, and what a thing actually is or is not. Her provocatively titled ‘Six plasticine balls, three of which are sculptures’ makes one wonder about how truthful a photographic representation might actually be, and whether any of the balls in the photograph are in any meaningful sense different from their neighbours. The title itself carries much of the work’s weight or meaning, turning the photograph into a kind of conundrum or visual pun.

Ekaterina Lupanova has in the past produced an aural audio diary comprised of recordings of everyday sounds. In foregrounding a deliberately non-visual record of the tracks and traces of mundane actions, the prominence given to the visual as a means of representing ‘reality’ is put, as it were, in competition with other modes of depiction, so as to throw greater attention onto the established hierarchy of the human senses. This suggests that conventional notions of the real are to a large extent culturally determined, and as such may be ripe for critical inspection. Such a sceptical perspective is also an important feature of Heather Ross’ video works, in which standard frameworks of televisual depiction are engagingly scrambled, with what we usually accept as ‘realism’ being effectively knocked off course by Ross’ use of multiple overlays, repetition, and ambiguous renditions of foreground and background, centre and margin. This layering of transparent ‘scenes’ implies a painterly approach to image-making, a process of building up a suggestive but cleverly deceptive field of depth.

Whenever ‘painting’ in the standard sense of that expression is not the most prevalent feature of Taint, its ghostly presence is yet everywhere in evidence, a common connection across the vast territory touched upon in the present exhibition.

Peter Suchin