Rosebud’: Charles Foster Kane’s last word.

Spending his life amassing wealth and nurturing his empire, Kane, the great media tycoon protagonist of Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane, becomes ultimately reclusive and delusional. Strolling about his cavernous mansion, Xanadu, Kane is seething with bitterness. Allaying these thoughts and feelings are memories of his youth, characterised by innocence and purity, and symbolised by ‘Rosebud’ - the name of his childhood sled. The object cause of his desire, or as Jaques Lacan would have it the ‘objet petit a’, Rosebud is a symbolic substitute for what Kane is without and will, despite his best efforts, never have: time past.

This exhibition of new paintings by Dan Coombs (b.1971) and Sophie Ives (b. 2002) is characterised by this same desire. Whether in the oblique collages or subtle self-portraits of Sophie Ives, or in the striking but soft emanations of Dan Coombs, the desire is pervasive and palpable. These figures vibrating in ecstatic reverie, feeling not thinking, are manifestations of sentiment and experience. As works, they speak of the void we all know, of something experiential, barely describable, and which sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation. It is in this ambiguity that they excel, presenting a paradoxically clear interpretation of experience.

In Ives’ transportive works on paper which blur the boundary between painting and drawing, the brush (or other end of) scrapes remaining pigment from oil sticks and dances across the the surface, leaving traces of catharsis. These figures are symbols of bodily experience, whether dancing, making love, or otherwise being. Her collages and other paintings on board, which represent a new direction and newfound determination, are comparatively fierce: these figures are self-conscious and conscious of you too - they are almost swearing at the viewer.   

Coombs, a recognised and committed figurative painter, has long addressed the nuance of the psyche. His paintings of single figures here address alone-ness as opportunity to experience solace, contemplativeness, and pleasure. While mostly expressive and dynamic, they are evidence of a surprising precision and economy of paint-handling, and his titles (either Woman or Figure) highlight the openness by which they are characterised: these paintings are of you, me, and everyone else.