YOU HAVE TO LAUGH

You have to laugh. You have to. Laugh. Escape and relief. Relieve yourself. Piss, piss it all out, piss and get pissed. Binge. Binge the lot. All in one night. It’s the best medicine. 

You Have To Laugh is an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by James Lincoln, made in the looming and monotonous shadow of covid and lockdown cycles. Reflecting a conscious shift by the artist towards autobiography, they depict the daily and weekly rituals that have punctuated this long period. Days and nights in the house on the sofa, isolating, drinking with friends at the pub or the park, the hangovers, the boredom, and the terror all feature as subjects in the work.

Lincoln uses an exploratory process of drawing and erasure to make the work, working not from sketches or photos but directly on to the surface. This approach fosters a stylistic flexibility as each work follows a path that is opened up through the making. However, the work is still characterised as a collective by a flatness. The planar avatars populate sparse colour field stages with a frontal and shallow theatricality. The subjects often appear puppet like, using a language that draws on influences from narrative medieval and ancient art, magic realism, cartoons, the Grotesque, masks, and art history, in particular the abbreviated Modernist depictions of the body.