George Shaw: The Sly and Unseen Day

George Shaw - Ash Wednesday:8.30am (2004-5)

I don't think I've ever written about art before. Save for the odd 'shout out' on Facebook for shows which I've attended and wanted to alert others to, writing about art seems to me rather an onanistic exercise. But having been to the George Shaw exhibition at the South London Gallery today, I wanted to get some thoughts down.

Shaw is a painter. His subject matter is the mundane, the everyday, the 'built form' (as architects like to call buildings) and their relationship with nature and the elements. The Sly and Unseen Day (a quote from Thomas Hardy) is a series of paintings including depictions of the Tile Hill estate in the West Midlands, where he grew up. Shaw works with Humbrol, a thick, noxious paint normally used by modellers, which produces a glossy, richly coloured canvas. The combination of the palette and the detail in these paintings left me quite light headed, and if you get near to them, you get a huge whiff of paint, like the things are still being worked on.

Francis Bacon once said that 'artists stay closer to their childhood than other people', and George Shaw's work openly acknowledges the impact of memory and nostalgia. His paintings could be anywhere in this country, and viewing them you think "I know where that is," except you don't really. The prefab library, the communal park on the estate, we've all got these images in our heads. Shaw does in his paintings what we do all the time. We romanticise, we gloss, we filter the mundane and the everyday from our pasts and make them nicer places to inhabit.

But unlike our memories, there are no people in Shaw's work, just buildings, backdrops to human drama which he imbues with a drama of their own - the only signs of habitation are lovingly reproduced graffiti on a wall, or traces of litter strewn on a winding path . Consciously filmic (Tarkovsky's and Tarr's static shots of buildings and nature come to mind), these paintings are intensely impressive.

I haven't been this moved at an exhibition for quite a while. It closes on 3rd July. Highly recommended.