Horseplay in a Time Before Ege Bamyasi

'The past is a foreign country', so begins L P Hartley's 1953 novel The Go Between. A line that beautifully captures the elusive nature of memory. Most of us recall the past as fragmented moments, hard visual or audible information that we flesh out with imagined scenarios that validate our personal agendas.

Andrew Bond's paintings take this concocted filler and replace it with visual imagery that disrupts any logical narrative attached to core memory. The result is a manifestation of 'the other'—something that was but wasn't, a no-man's land of half truths and outright lies.

Bond layers hard truths drawn from historical art images—Lucas Cranach the Elder's Adam and Eve, George Stubbs' animal anatomy studies, Albrecht Dürer's drawings—alongside personal family stories and recognisable figuration that may or may not fit the unfolding narrative. Hybrid beings appear throughout, part one thing and part another, echoing the 'droleries' of medieval illuminated manuscripts.

These paintings unfold upon highly saturated colour fields that could be seen as completed works in their own right. As they develop, they reveal their own internal truths, with stories that are personal to the artist and nonsensical to others. Bond invites each viewer to create their own personal narrative or interpretation, one that becomes fluid and changes with each encounter.