Exhibition review at Long Ryle December 2003

Lucinda Bredin The Week London.

Simon Casson (b. 1965), who has had solo exhibitions in Holland, the US and Britain since 1996,paints pictures that are patch works of tantalisingly
not-quite recognisable fragments of Old Master paintings.
Bits of drapery, figures and still-life are “collaged” together with occasional strips of blank canvas and smears of paint, rendering the image momentarily out’ of focus or blurred by speed. There are also passages of non-descriptive bravura brushwork, suggesting stormy skies or landscape, which take the eye back into space for a breather from the voluptuous surface. Titles from classical mythology – such as Pelias’s Journey – add a slightly mere dignity and depth; but for all the fashionable ambiguity, these paintings with their rich colours and surfaces, virtuoso paint-handling, and scale, have something of the presence of the Old Masters they so deftly plunder.