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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Writer Alasdair Gray vs artist Francesca Lowe. Do you know where you’re going? Feeling a bit lost and confused by life? Stuck in sin or aiming for more worthy things? The idea of moral guidance in the modern world is at the basis of Francesca Lowe’s brilliant exhibition at Riflemaker.The project is a kind of creative collaboration with Scottish writer/genius Alasdair Gray. Both Lowe and Gray created work – in her case an exhibition, in his a story in a beautiful little booklet for the show – based around similar ideas of moralism and the title of the show, Terminus. Her work, in particular, was loosely inspired by his approach and imagery, though nothing is illustrated or obvious.  The results, however, are fascinating. Lowe’s paintings are technically brilliant. She creates work that fuses muscular, neo-classical bodies with text gleaned from fairground imagery and advertising logos. Rather than the strictness of Renaissance figures, Lowe’s classicism is more 18th-century inspired – sexy, louche, constantly in flux, chaotic. The heart of the exhibition is a map, a kind of tree of life, which is also a kind of visual key to the rest of the show. Lowe looks at classic symbols and their traditional meanings and uses them to illustrate and explore ideas around the cycle of life. This tree has dirty vices at the bottom and good, honourable things at the top. As you work your way around the room each piece expands on the imagery from this visual key. It’s like a Pilgrim’s Progress given a 21st-century art update.  There’s a lot of movement in these paintings – this is life as one big merry-go-round. Bunny/hare creatures run on wheels with legs flying everywhere. Death rears its lush head on a white horse. Other pieces are beautiful reinventions of pop art; the logos from Triumph motorcycles transformed into a (possibly tongue in cheek) icon of hope. The connection to Gray’s writing may not be obvious, but it doesn’t matter. His writing in the small book is jaw-droppingly good while Lowe’s paintings are lascivious joys.
Francesca Gavin
Francesca Lowe & Alasdair Gray – Terminus is at Riflemaker, London, until 15 December 07.
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