Strange Gaze: Surrealism at Cross Lanes Projects is a new group exhibition at Cross Lane Projects in Kendal with, according to the press release, the intention to present contemporary surrealist practice through ‘dreamlike and figurative works that reference and react to the current political and ecological context’. The exhibition invokes the specific history of the Surrealist movement through two commissioned essays in a handsome catalogue, reminding viewers of the historical origin of the movement and its potential relation to the exhibition. A viewer wouldn’t need to read these essays to access the show, but I do think it would be useful to know a little about Surrealism’s key influence: Sigmund Freud and his writing on psychoanalysis and the unconscious. Freud brought to public discourse the ways we each repress and cover over our desires out of fear and shame, and Surrealism took seriously methods that sought to access dreams and inner drives. Prominent Surrealist artists created artwork with characteristics that represented both our shared outer world, as well as the slippery inner world of the unconscious and our mercurial, shameful fantasies. Strange Gaze reconstitutes Surrealism’s methods, responding to the anxieties of our contemporary context. Rebecca Scott, the director of the gallery and one of the exhibiting artists, has curated a show of mainly new medium-sized and large-scale paintings and painting-adjacent work.
Four Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) etchings form a link to the Surrealism of the twentieth century, and his works singularly present the more conventional sexual undertone that Surrealism is so often associated with. His etchings punctuate the exhibition, isolated from other works. These small framed etchings, which sit on mere slithers of wall, only make sense from getting intimately close. ‘The Doll’ (no date) is a sketch of a figure that is difficult to interpret. Visible are one solitary, stripey stockinged leg, breasts, bows, and puppet limbs. There’s a sense that this is a child’s doll, but there are clearly references to adult sexuality, creating tensions in how to read the visual references. In ‘Sans titre (Femmes cordes)’ (no date), fleshy stalactites dangle. Testicular folds are enveloped by legs crossed around them, arms, feet, hands, swirls of ribbon or smoke.
In another Bellmer, ‘Untitled’ (no date) a couple sit against a banquet, a table in front of them with a glass, decanter, and an ashtray. Here, a naked female figure with chignoned hair reaches her hand into the crotch of a clothed male who wears a cravat around his neck, a hint of a waistcoat, maybe a tailcoat and unbuttoned shirt: his respectability is undone by her lusty hands. In the final Bellmer, ‘Zwei Frauenakte’ (no date) two figures are dissected by grid lines, checks blurring out a nipple, anticipating the pixelation which censors details of our digital culture. Large breasts, a tight waist, pubic hair, a ruff, feline features looking out. And a back view, a bow, a cascade of hair, bare buttocks, a hint of vulva. These four delicate, scratchy black drawings remind the viewer of the bodily, bawdy naughtiness of the Surrealist movement and its capacity to take seriously the fleeting sexual fantasies we might have as we interact with the world. Through the rest of the exhibition though, the contemporary artworks suggest that our unconscious anxieties have shifted away from the erotic, and towards more sprawling preoccupations that connect to environmental and political fears.
At first glance I was apprehensive of the cohesion of such a large exhibition. Pleasingly though, there’s a rhythm to the curation that aids viewing. Artists’ works are paired up and set in dialogue, with many of the works displayed as diptychs with contrasting works placed between them. This made me think of the ideas of doubling and doppelgangers in Freud’s work, and the mirror-self that represents that which is repressed, creating what he terms the uncanny.
The exhibition commences in an alcove at the front of the gallery, creating an area for an enigmatic first theme: images recollected. Three nearly one-metre-square paintings: ‘Song Without Words’ (2011), ‘Magnetic North’ (2015), and ‘Folio Sacra, Library of Babel’ (2016) by Ian Firth Powell, alternate with paintings roughly half the size, by Suzy Willey, to stage a conversation on images remembered and abstracted. Firth’s abstract oil paintings contain details that feel as though they can almost be read and understood. For example: lines from an exercise book, a gate, birds, tree trunks and branches. In ‘Ticker Tape’ (2024), ‘Air India’ (2024) and ‘Hats off’ (2024) Willey uses pastel-coloured impasto in glossy straight, squared brush marks on top of thickly painted scenes from Tin Tin, suggested by the titles, including an Air India plane and hats flying off heads, to partially veil the image. In all of these paintings there is a sense of both abstract painting, and recognisable images partially obscured.

On the opposite wall in the alcove, two large collages by Mike Healey incorporate warped surfaces, that appear to be produced through chemical patterning and accidental marks, ‘FRACTURED LANDSCAPE’ (2016) and ‘THREE MAENADS RESTING’ (2023) conjure geological strata, rock formations, patterns to make sense of, and patterns to get lost in.
Alternated with Healey’s pieces are Denise Hawrysio’s modest smaller collages. In ‘St. Basil Fire Dream’ (2024) the recognisable Moscow cathedral is doubled in a water reflection, but the upright image here is the reflection. Upside down, the cathedral has been cut out to reveal a basilica absence, filled in with flames. In her second image, ‘Eye in Mirror’ (2023) a tiled floor is streaked with dark smears (of blood? Excrement?) suggesting something has been dragged across them. Hovering on top of this floor, a perfectly made-up eye peers out of a powder-case mirror. The contrast here is between the idealised image of the eye, presumably cut from a vintage fashion magazine, and the scene underneath in which the implication is that something disgusting or dirty has happened. There is a sense of sharp contrast between the two registers in each image brought together. In both of Hawrysio’s collages, there seems to be an implication of violence.
In the front half of the large room is another theme: the landscape as a site of environmental panic repudiates the art historical trope of the idealised idyll. On the first wall, two paintings by Perdita Sinclair, ‘Slipstream 1’ and ‘Slipstream 2’(both 2024) mirror each other: multicoloured icebergs sit on top of a tranquil sea. Are they icebergs or a tutti frutti peak of soft serve ice cream? With this artificiality and eye candy of sugary processed food, the siren song of toxic confection stands in for how we interact with the natural environment. On the final wall of the space, visible from the front of the gallery are two further paintings by Sinclair. ‘Solito 1’ and ‘Solito 2’ (both 2024) operate similarly; Buoys sit on a calm sea, with fish scales and tail growing out the top. Here the uncanny is deployed to make urgent our exploitative and oppressive relation to the environment.
A single, large painting by Rebecca Scott sits on the following wall. Three cuts of meat levitate above a landscape, rendered with an ochre hue. The landscape looks sickly, or dried out or antiquated. What’s up, landscape? What ails you? The meat functions as a visceral non-sequitur dominating the image. It looks gruesome rather than wholesome to my eye. Closing the gap between farming and plate. The food pipeline made explicit. I recall the short silent French documentary film Le Sang des bêtes (1949), in which the blood of the beasts drips from slaughterhouses to remind diners of the origins of their food.
Two digitally constructed collages flank the meat painting. If you relax your eyes, Emily Allchurch’s images appear as Renaissance landscapes paintings. On second glance, though, it’s clear the image is a photograph. On closer inspection, the unnaturally sharp focussed details, such as a path leading up hills, litter, masts, tower blocks do lead the eye around the image as a painting would — there is no focal point as in a photograph. In the foreground of ‘Waiting for Inspiration (after Bellini)’ (no date) is a notebook and uni-ball pen, a DSLR and case: the artist stages her process. In Worldscape (after Patinir) (2008), a rug, a coconut, a Ganesh figurine, a bitten apple, some ash all suggest a well travelled unseen figure.

At the back of the main gallery space a new conversation opens up — the body distorted through representation. ‘What a Dick Van Dyke’ (2023), a large painting by Bex Massey, opens up this theme. A naked body serves as the painting’s ground, but this is obscured by images superimposed, making it unclear if it is one body or two and whether there is a buttock or breast cleft. Floating on the top left we can see a blue and white check shirt and on the top right, that shape inverted and serving as a window onto which we can see Dick Van Dyke as Bert in Mary Poppins in the ‘Jolly Holiday’ number. In the bottom left of the image are black outlines of cartoon sheep from the same section of the film. The ‘Jolly Holiday’ number sees Bert and Mary singing and dancing in an animated scene complete with talking animals. The references in the image: the naked body, an item of clothing, and a children’s film all occupy distinct shapes and feel like jigsaw puzzle pieces not yet put together into a picture.
Next to Dick Van Dyke is Pascal Rousson’s much smaller ‘Untitled’ (2020). A Cubist-reminiscent figure has its innards exposed to reveal a partial view of cartoon character: its gruesome grin and the edge of a car. On the opposite wall is Rousson’s painting, ‘003’ (2020), in which abstract forms recall George Braque and butt up against half a cartoon face which looks to be peeling or festering. The large eye, open wide, conveys innocence and horror. Rousson’s work incorporates multiple stylistic quotations, posing: is it preferable to be high or low artwork?
On the back wall, two large paintings depict bodies in motion. ‘Mythopoeic Altar (Vigeland)’ (2022) and ‘Mythopoeic Manoeuvres II (Vigeland)’ (2024) by Dereck Harris present the expressive flow of contemporary dancer bodies pulling and pushing, extending into space. Behind them, an indistinct view of sculptures on plinths; classical torsos continue beyond the frame. A museum room full of static but revered bodies, contrasting contemporary bodies in motion.
Between Harris’s paintings is Emma Cousin’s painting ‘Burrow’(2023), with three sad-looking cartoon-like figures, one without a front, one without a skull top, another without eyes. Are these sagging incomplete bodies consoling or further shaming one another? Positioned in relation to Harris’s paintings with contemporary dancers, the tension in the arrangement seems to pose the question: what kinds of bodies communicate? And what does it mean to be in our imperfect bodies?
Two large paintings dominate the temporary walls perpendicular to one another, both by Dan Coombs: ‘English Corner’ (2019) and ‘Secrets’ (2019). The two scenes are reminiscent of Georges Seurat’s Bathers at ‘Asnières’ (1884) or Édouard Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ (1862-3). Here the bodies in the scene, naked, bikinied, standing, seated, lounging, bathing, are combed through, streaky and reminiscent of photocopies overcopied. The scenes glitch rather than transmit an ideal haven of landscape and bodies.
Moving around the room, we return once again to the contested landscape. James Mackie’s two hyper-real paintings sit on the temporary wall, presenting wind turbines decaying and covered over with vegetation. Here is a future scene in which our present environmental solutions are mere historical remnants.
Between Sinclair’s buoys, Mark Fairington’s ‘Orchid Tree over Hoo’ (2024), another hyper-real painting, presents tree roots supporting vegetation, orchids, lizards, birds — this ecosystem hovers above the sea and a collection of moored boats.
These final paintings envisage our planet after humans, when nature takes back what we are destroying. It is painting’s capacity to visualise rather than resolve or repress the complicated mess that constitutes our everyday experience that triumphs in this exhibition. In our hyper-image fixated culture, Strange Gaze offers legibility to our collective unconscious, reminding us of painting’s capacity to show what we conceal in our constant attempts to perfect images, master the landscape and control our bodies. The false promise of digital image perfection brings us only misery. In the slipperiness of surreal paintings, we have space to think differently.
Strange Gaze: Surrealism at Cross Lane Projects, Kendal, 5 October to 24 November 2024. The exhibition catalogue is here.
Alison J Carr is an artist, mentor and scholar.
This review is supported by Cross Lane Projects.
Published 17.10.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
2,146 words