What's the Angle, Mason Kimber?

My interest in architecture is tickled with fancy at the structure of Mason Kimber's paintings, particularly my favourite from his current exhibition, Arcades at Galerie pompom, Pathway/Patina.

In Pathway/Patina, Kimber has found a way around the inadequacy of paint to create tangible depth by stretching the canvas with semi-translucent layers of the same coloured deep blue fabric. It has a similarly compelling nature to the pigment works of Yves Klein, where you simply fall into the blueness. With a white oil stick he has given us the gentlest of directions towards a vanishing point somewhere on the right, so instead of falling into an abyss, we fall into the painting. At the edge, a pastiche of textural fragments have been cut and collaged to frame the picture - this is the threshold we cross to step inside. Similar to his frescoes there is a slowness about the process of this painting because each fragment glued to the fabric is made at various, potentially unrelated, points in time, so the painting starts not knowing what it is going to be until Kimber corrals it together. Like different architectural details chosen over time and finally appearing all in the same space.

Historically this work has a nearer reach than his preceding suite of frescos. Instead of evidence of renaissance masters, which reared their influential heads when Kimber took residence at the British School at Rome, the architectural theories of Gaston Bachelard and collage techniques of Kurt Schwitters come to the fore. These are refined works; they are clever in their apparent confusion and striking in their technical and logical merit. Mason is a painter’s painter - he’s got a thorough idea, a confident mark and an engaging composition. In her exhibition essay Stella Rose McDonald astutely points out that Kimber is making ‘Paintings of Paintings’. Painterly angles lead us to the point that Kimber is thinking about Painting, and painting about thinking, which is a very good angle to have if you're a painting painter. Paint.