De Brock

De Brock is pleased to present its third solo exhibition with Keith Coventry. There is a beauty to Suprematism and its vision to fashion an understanding of a new multi-dimensional, non-Newtonian, world of purity without objects, a non-objective world in flux. This is a world without commodities and philosophy whose attachment to the shape-shifting fourth dimension could never have imagined any association with the birth of globalist deregulationary neo-liberalism. This, however, is just the sort of connection that Keith Coventry – the history painter of the late 20th and early 21st century – brings to bear. If his Junk Paintings harnessed fragments of the Golden Arches of McDonald’s to Suprematism to reveal the tarnished implications of its pure vision, his Gastro-Constructivism deploys its poor relation Burger King to similar ends.

The spark for Coventry’s subjects is found, more often than not, as a part of his daily life – for instance, the particular milieu he inhabits or his leisured walking around a city – and with his current paintings a visit to a Burger King in his hometown Burnley, when its degraded screen-printed schematic renderings of a burger on the walls, sparked his imagination. The constituent parts of a burger were just printed blocks of colour on the wall, each denoting ingredients: bun, cheese, beef, ham, lettuce, onion, gherkin, chicken, meat substitute, fish, relish, sauce, mustard, pickle … the list is endless, a list defining the plenitude of consumerist desire and demands. The blocks of colour in Coventry’s painting define not just the ingredient but also challenge the pathetic belief in control of destiny – that the demand to ‘supersize me’ or ‘hold the mayo’, or any other instruction levelled at the server to construct your perfect burger, is a form of empowerment on behalf of the individual (can belief in one’s own destiny really be realised through placing an order at a fast-food bar?) or is it just an indication of an engaged, relational, individualist enslavement to fast food, globalised, brand power.

Unlike the cheaply printed imagery on the walls of the Burnley Burger King, each of Coventry’s paintings – the colour, touch, facture, impasto and gestured mark making that they reveal – express an aesthetic sensibility and individualist beauty that fruitfully reconstitutes or rearranges Malevich’s geometries. We never see an image of a complete burger with Coventry’s paintings, just a half. He has transformed the disintegrating Burger King imagery, he had at first encountered, into a play of fragments, elements, and traces that are in many ways not unlike a transactional relic, the significance of which is accelerated by its untouchability, framed, and venerated behind glass.