THOMAS CAMERON - CITY SCENES

Thomas Cameron’s practice revolves around fleeting ordinary moments in life that are often overlooked due to their familiarity. Through his work, Cameron aims to document moments taken directly from urban life that are characterised by their isolated and sometimes melancholic subjects, technical skill and economy of mark making. His compositions explore the relationship we have with the city, and each other and are securely located in an art historic tradition. He cites Édouard Manet and Walter Sickert as key influences and explains how expressive, loose marks used to depict a reflection or a shadow can open paintings up, allowing for ambiguity and new narrative associations to form. The paintings also carry on an American Realist tradition, as though Edward Hopper has been suddenly displaced into London in 2022.

Cameron talks about how appealing he found the vernacular photography in his family picture books; candid scenes of everyday life, in posterity, can appear beautiful and carry intense pathos. The paintings have a similar warmth, but never fully drift into sentimentality. Armful painted in 2022 and selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries is a high street tableaux of a girl on the phone with a white plastic bag hanging from her wrist, behind her, partly occluded by a pillar, is the word “DEBENHAM” in bright white lights. These coincidental moments of absurdity are what gives Cameron’s paintings an innate charm, beyond that of the traditionally skilful painting. Cameron explains how he is interested in pictorial devices, and how these can be used to create a psychological landscape.

The artist is drawn to this sense of immersion, carefully composing his images, populating them with his subjects and offering a filmic quality to his scene through a vibrant colour palette, dramatic lighting, and the suggestion of narrative. The Kitchen Sink cinema is another of Cameron’s important touchstones. This type of works were popular in post-war Britain and depicted the daily struggles of the working class in a realistic way, focusing on troubled anti-heroes and addressing issues that concerned the mid-20th century British society. Cameron’s paintings deliver this kind of realism: although they emphasize the off-the-cuff capturing of reference images, they nonetheless feel organized and structured. This is down to Cameron’s deft understanding of the grammar of banality, how people move in the street, the shopping complex, the building site. Cameron apprehends these dialectic moments of recognition, and paints them; unlocking a kind of latent magic that exists in the day to day.