'Grief and Oblivion'
Matt Price
Violence and battles are central to the recent works of painter Sally Payen. In a major new oil painting
created for the exhibition, He had to run to save himself from oblivion, yet through running he forgets
himself (2010) Payen brings together a plethora of imagery taken from urban riots – some from
Birmingham, some from Brighton, others from Northern Ireland. Masked rioters brandishing improvised
weapons confront riot police on horseback, while shadowy figures are engaged in a number of incidents
and episodes around them.
Painted in a muted palette of greys with the slightest washes of yellow, blue and red, the figurative
elements of the painting teeter on the edge of abstraction, merging with the architecture suggested
behind – some brick-like forms, some arches receding into the right hand corner, and some railings or
barriers that penetrate the action. It is a dreamlike scene, a collage of half-remembered vignettes from
newspapers, TV and the Internet, capturing a sense of the breakdown of law and order that must be
experienced in the midst of civil unrest.
Payen’s accomplished painting brings a refined vocabulary of brush marks and textures to calculated yet
naïve, stylized forms. The painting speaks of something primordial within civilisation, of primitive instincts
being played out in late capitalist society and of the aggressive underbelly of (a largely patriarchal)
democracy. Whilst being a very modern painting, that it is influenced by the history of painting and of
battle scenes is made clear by the accompanying oil on gesso work Battle, after Uccello (2010) – a small
though highly animated painting of a partially masked figure poised to throw a short pole or stake of some
kind at a mounted policeman.
The reference to Paolo Uccello’s 15th-century masterpiece at the National Gallery, The Battle of San
Romano (sometimes referred to as The Rout of San Romano) connects Payen’s contemporary scenes of
rioting to Niccolò da Tolentino leading Florentine cavalry against the army of Siena. Another piece by
Payen, also entitled Battle, after Uccello (2010) depicts just the policeman on horseback, rendered with a
remarkable economy of painterly means – just a small number of carefully executed brush strokes evoking
all of the drama, movement, and physicality of the horseman under attack. It is drama, movement and
physicality in the heat of a riot that are the focus of Payen’s two paintings The Fear (2010), depicting
groups of young men marauding through the streets. Viewed close-up and from slightly above, as if from
CCTV cameras, the aggression and tension is palpable, the men looking about them with an overriding air
of menace.
'The Falling'
Jane Neal
‘The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.’ (Virginia Woolf, ‘An Unwritten Novel’ 1921)
Virgina Woolf’s words could have been written for Sally Payen’s new paintings. The large-scale canvases
that initially appear to belong to the categories of colour-field painting or geometric abstraction (such is
the deliberate flatness of their surfaces and the recurring motif of the grid), refuse to yield all life to the
void and instead throw up a strange melange of barely perceptible silhouettes of soldiers, suited figures,
wild horses and the delicate traces of skeletal cages. There is no Euclidian geometry or perspective in
Payen’s work to anchor these troubling forms and yet, as with a dream when we know instinctively what
is up, and what is down, there is a logic to Payen’s work that goes beyond the learned formulae of western
art and looks instead to a language of forms and symbols that predates the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation’
(such as can be found in cave painting from the Upper Palaeolithic period); a language that we understand
and relate to in both our conscious state, and in our dreams.