Paul Westcombe

Paul Westcombe's new work made for the café project space consists of a large wall installation of large paintings on paper and drawings on domestic objects such as a mop, travel card receipts and coffee cups.

This expansive wall painting installation brings in the architectural elements around it while spewing out imagery taken from the reactionary obsessions of the tabloid press; serial killers and horoscopes coalesce in one grim smorgasbord.

Sprawling tendrils, dismembered genitalia, rancid murderers and seething reptiles reach out of the architecture threatening to suck us in. The obsessive prison doodling writ is fused with the child like vernacular of dot to dot and colouring books to create a sense of deep unease. The work appears as dystopian dream sequences, fragments of recognisable images loom up uncannily from the vistas of a diseased mind. The tableaux conjured here doesn't offer any exit routes; to retreat into the world of the imagination is to meet with the grim realisation the subjective has been entirely colonised.