STEPHEN LOUGHMANTBG+S DUBLIN14 AUGUST3.55PM.SUNNY. — STEPHEN LOUGHMAN
TBG+S DUBLIN
14 AUGUST
3.55PM.
SUNNY.

RED.

RED Stephen Loughman’s press release. Red horny exposé article with glossy crotch displayed on bench on exiting gallery. Movie references abound here. See. Stephen Loughman doesn’t flirt with reference, he goes to the drive-in cinema, gets comfy and goes from first to fist base (as they say in the movies). His commitment to the pause button is True Love until the FFW>> button turns his head—marriage to mistress in a filmic moment. Cold, calculated, dealing in doubles as a figurative painter until the movie still warms the blood of even stiller paintings. But the dumb-double that press releases present, that institutional drug, rug, dog, this time, this place, puts the referential Ex centre stage, where Loughman’s painting ought to be, and is, until you read or have ‘red’. Like how Netflix's end-of-season-squishy-couch-get-together cracks the mirror of the Other, an Other you have endured and loved more than your real friends… So Don’t! Don’t read! If you haven't already 'red'. Painting is better beside itself, not on a squishy couch with douchebags. Look. Look how Loughman’s sequential diptychs violently show-up how boring solo figurative painting is, including his own here, even when locked into an overarching narrative. Loughman shows us that we can't play ping-pong with one; and teaches us to experience space and narrative and desire as a curve rather than a line. Ain't saying Einstein ain't sexy but Loughman's diptychs make relativity curvier, Lacanian. So if you did what I did— ‘read’ or “red” —then splice at moment you picked up aforementioned gloss and toss, and engage onomatopoeia for tape cassette rewind. Back<<back to meeting the gaze of gallery invigilator; back<<back to a painting I criticised as mere ‘scenery’ relative to the ping-pong complexity and painterly splendour of Loughman’s two real diptychs—and one imagined that is not a diptych but implied diptych due to architectural doubling; back<<back to Duchampian glory and nesting hole for yin-yang wink-wank contemplation; back<<back to diptych No. 2 with chair-barricading-door scenarios that inhales—depending on your pills—the breadth of horror movie cliché in one breath and Joseph Kosuth in the next, exhale; back<<back to more solo-scenery and mood levellers and to diptych that is not a diptych; back<<back to first sideward glance and smile at diptych No. 1 with ‘Red’ Ford Cortina slipping, sliding and diving into night and ice. Door.