David Eastwood’s paintings offer us intriguing and constructed realities that have had no prior existence. They are a gathering together of elements, taken from many sources, selected and deployed for their part in these fabrications. The paintings are worked from neither a directly photographed nor a directly observed single reality. Eastwood slightly manipulates perspective, evokes associations between various elements, hinting, perhaps teasing us, at historical and contemporary sourcing as he builds this reality with confidence and virtuosity. The paint is evenly applied and there is no backing away from sharp focus and certainty of representation. The components in the paintings are formed from precise analytical observation and assembled with equally precise compositional understanding. To do this one must draw on not just skill, but an intelligence sometimes underrated by those who have little experience with the demands of what he seeks to do.

There is also our sense of recognition of both the total image and all of its components to be considered. We are offered hints of Dutch interiors in the patterned floors, or is it hints of Leagues Club carpets? We can find imagery we may link to De Chirico, to Magritte, to late medieval painting or even to a contemporary furniture catalogue – or perhaps not. We need make no conclusions, our response to the paintings doesn’t hinge on the certainty of our deconstruction. We can just explore them, admire them, and allow for possibilities in our imaginations, knowing that there are no correct conclusions that we must arrive at. They evoke stories but they don’t tell us stories, and this is what we enjoy in them.

There is evidence of activity and objects that might relate to humans, but no figures to become the centre of both image and interpretation. Eastwood is very familiar with Dutch interiors of the Vermeer kind but he chooses to not employ ‘staffage’ in his imaging. The hinting of human presence is enough and the completion of any narrative remains the prerogative of the spectator.

We are given carefully considered titles for his works and again, very much in the contemporary manner, these titles remain evocative but open. The works are clear, the selection and imaging of all their parts is precise, the composition is carefully considered and the suggestion of possible meanings is deliberate. Yet a precise meaning, if it is needed, remains tantalisingly unspecific and must reside for each spectator within their own response. This is Eastwood’s intention and very much an integral part of these remarkable and absorbing paintings.

Ian Grant, August 2011