There and Then, Marcus Galleries, Birmingham, 2004

Joshua Uvieghara's abstract paintings embody a different kind of mobility. He uses very ordinary materials: MDF panels and household gloss paint. The paint is poured onto the panel and spread by the force at gravity. The panels are tilted in various directions as the paint flows over the surface to produce a type of marking that breaks with the regularity, say, of Ian Davenport's dripped paintings. They are reminiscent of scientific photographs of turbulence: the airstream behind an unseen object, or a disturbance in some viscous liquid. Their uncompromisingly abstract appearance conceals a painting procedure that teeters on the brink of figuration. The shapes the paint assumes are, like Oliver's photographs, indexes of the movement Ihat has produced them, but their sense of direction has been fatally disturbed. Where Modernist grid lines pointed towards a rational and rationalised future, these lines meander. They are sceptical of the grid from which they derive and hesitailt about the type of future they envisage.