Walead Beshty: Marginalia, Thomas Dane

Walead Beshty is an artist whose work often rides the coattails of figuration before retreating back into the comfort zone of abstraction. That much is made clear in the current Walead Beshty Barbican exhibition which coincides with his second solo show at Thomas Dane, London. Over at the Barbican it is the impression, the ghost of objects that are left visible before being subsumed by the enormity of their installation.

As at the Barbican, in the ironically titled exhibition Marginalia, scale plays a leading role. The works in Marginalia seduce the eye into a giving them a closer look and encourage visitors to loose themselves in the patterns and riddled structures. They are suggestive of something concrete, but it’s hard to discern exactly what that might be. Critics suggest that invisible networks of power and meaning are the true subject of Beshty’s images, but, on the evidence of the works in this show, it is hard to concur. In fact it is hard to come to any certain conclusions at all.

Not for the faint-hearted lover of contemporary art work, but a curious exhibition at the Thomas Dane Gallery that adds colour to the Barbican exhibition.