As much as I love venturing to the deepest ends of East, South, and beyond London for unique and ever changing shows in the art world, I treasure the times I go West. There’s nothing quite like a good find on your side of the city.
Felix & Spear is a gallery established in 2015 and focused on a carefully curated private collection of works by both contemporary, modern, and post-war artists. Their particularly high attention to detail is displayed in everything from their genuine choice of collaborations down to the beautifully printed exhibition booklet on a glossy card stock. I visited them for the first time in their small two story gallery in Ealing this weekend, where they were currently exhibiting Joie De Vivre, a collection of works by Paul Dash.
Barbados born, Dash moved at 11 years of age to England during the Windrush Era. He grew up in Oxford, where his father was a barber, and describes himself as “the only Black West Indian student there”. His father’s profession as a barber created a close community and clientele of Black West Indian ties in an age where black hair was a particularly sensitive topic. Dash soon began painting and attended the Chelsea School of Art, joining the Caribbean Artist’s Movement.
The exhibition space is small, but neat. The two rooms’ white walls are adorned with vivid paintings and careful sketches. The contrast here is particularly interesting; at first, I almost thought that the drawings were etchings due to the clean line work. But the sharp crosshatching is simply a completely different aspect of the artist’s practice: Dash explains how he sketches, but not as a base for his paintings, where he uses a “semi-abstract” plan. “In that sense my work has more in common to Jazz than with traditional European approaches to composition.”
Paul Dash, Night Revellers Gather for the Parade, 2016, mixed media on paper and collage, 74 x 72 cm
Dash’s work embodies freedom, rebellion, self expression, and resistance through collective movement. The sway is powerful within each painting, and the name of the exhibition echoes deeply throughout each visual. As I begin to descend the stairs, I am reading the exhibition booklet, and learning about the artist’s initial sources of inspiration for his aerial viewpoints. He describes standing at the top of a double decker bus as a teenager and looking down at the people, the architecture, the brilliance and energy of the city. I look up again and continue walking down the stairs, training my eye on the painting hanging by the banister. In my mind, I walk down to the bottom deck of an imaginary bus as the paintings begin to form little windows to the outside.
Paul Dash, Visitors Get Down in Bridgetown, 2010, oil on panel, 74 x 100 cm
This sort of collective viewpoint of the masses reminds me of artists such as Genovés, and achieves the same sense of cumulative impact, without the heavy and deeply somber undertone of the latter. However, even though they paint incredibly separate scenes reigned by opposite emotions (celebration / joy versus fleeing / fear), Dash achieves an underlying political message all the same. The unbridled joy and carnivalesque scenes have a focal point of African Caribbean identity and the artist’s own experience as a first generation immigrant.
The pleasant surprise of finding this stunning, vivacious collection has lifted my mood as I walk back up the stairs and return to the front of the gallery. On the way home, I make sure to sit at the front of the top floor of my bus, taking inspiration from the Paul Dash as I watch a throng of passerbys cross the bustling street beneath me.
Images copyright Paul Dash- provided courtesy of Felix & Spear.