Surface Tension
Lennox Dunbar RSA
Presented as part of RSA200, the Royal Scottish Academy’s bicentenary programme, Surface Tension brings the distinctive work of Lennox Dunbar RSA to Tighnabruaich Gallery.
There is something immediately physical about Dunbar’s paintings.
Built through layers of paint, collage, construction and found visual information, their surfaces appear fragmented, excavated and reassembled. They are paintings, but they have the presence of objects.
Surface Tension brings together works spanning different periods of Dunbar’s practice, revealing an artist who continues to question what a painting can be and how it might occupy space.
Ideas arrive from many places — something seen, remembered or encountered — and enter the work almost as fragments of information. They may be buried beneath subsequent layers, altered, obscured and rediscovered.
Dunbar describes something close to an archaeology of painting: the possibility that information can disappear into a work and later emerge again, changed by everything that has happened around it.
Presentation is equally important. Works sit directly and structurally on the wall, behind glass, within deep box frames and in display cases, deliberately challenging the conventional boundaries of the rectangular painted surface.
The result is an exhibition that rewards looking slowly.
Surfaces shift. Details appear and disappear. What initially seems familiar begins to resist easy interpretation.
Surface Tension invites us not simply to look at paintings, but to spend time discovering what has been buried within them.