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						Elegy for the Falling Man, Digital & Screenprint.
		THE GUTS OF SHADOWS 'The Guts of Shadows' consists of fourteen paintings and sixteen poems made over a two-year period in a close collaboration between painter and poet. The result is a complementary visual and verbal work in which one art reflects the other. Each image with its facing poem has been printed in an individual folder on a six-colour inkjet printer using pigmented inks on archival paper; each folder has then been gathered and hand-bound in a limited edition of 100 numbered and signed copies produced by Pratt Contemporary Art. A Special Edition of 50 copies, also numbered and signed, is accompanied by an original silkscreen print by John Wright of one of the images.
					The large variety of style and technique in John Wright’s paintings for The Guts of Shadows, untypical of the usual single collection, reflects the actual dynamic of this collaborative enterprise. The lack of harmony, the sense of dislocation, not only from one painting to another, but indeed within a single painting, is deliberate. He depicts individual or collective angst, a tortured underworld of the soul, the singular hallucinatory visions of the lone pilot on long flights, the symbiotic relationship between human and machine, or the stark brutalism of armed authority. At the same time, he creates semi-abstract ethereal paintings of architectural and organic colour-shapes subtly suspended in landscapes suffused with light. The work combines mixed media, oil and collage and is characterised by the understated but striking use of delicate washes punctuated by discrete strips of intense colour. The figurative work often displays a classical or mythic dimension which contrasts with Wright’s use of early aeronautical or mechanistic images in some of the pictures. The unadorned line, a guy wire, the stays between a biplane’s wings, underlie the tensions inherent in Wright’s painting. Drawing underpins all his work.
					The colloquial voice and essentially lyric mode of Robert Vas Dias’s poetry conceal more diversity of tone and structure than may at first be apparent. He celebrates the energy and spirit of urban life but combines this with a nervy insistence on its provisionality – the fragility of the constructed world of roads, bridges, subways and tunnels where, at any moment, the escalator might lurch to a standstill, stairways collapse and planes fall out of the sky. Tension in the work is created by alternating allusiveness with directness, amplitude with concision, and images of daily life with reflections on consequence and mutability. The poems inhabit that space between dream and wakefulness where concrete images of nightmare, of the individual trapped or falling, are juxtaposed with a sense that out of this maelstrom a new kind of order or transformation is possible, that accidence and contingency create their own meaning. An ironic, sometimes darkly comedic view of the self pervades some of the poems, giving way to more celebratory poems of human connection.