The display of Rachel Howard’s recent work at the Hastings branch of the Jerwood Gallery feels like a strangely divided affair, the paintings falling into two quite distinct groups. The more compelling set, smaller in scale, are mainly concerned with the materiality of paint. Surface qualities are to the fore, riven as they are with cracks, rivulets and delicate black hairlines. In Lean To an irregular grid is abraded, obscured or partly washed away by other layerings, while the grid in Sleepless is disrupted like rips in a net, the loosened lines clinging to one another in places like the fine strands of a broken web. These are subtle and evocative paintings, and although they sometimes invite readings as vast landscapes seen from the air, those readings are resisted by the variety of mark-making and subtle distortions of their largely monochromatic palettes. For one feature that gradually exerts pressure on you is the subtle use of bright fluorescent colours. In many works they bleed out at the edges of the canvas, as if one of the first layers to be applied in what appears to have been a lengthy painting process. But in other works, such as Fall, the fluorescence glows softly through the … continue reading