Eva Bensasson
David Birkin
David Boulogne
Godfried Donkor
Paul Fryer
James P Graham
Alex Hamilton
Piers Jackson
Hilary Koob-Sassen
Liane Lang
Peter Lewis
Emma McNally
Seboo Migone
Polly Morgan
Otto Muehl
Valerie Stahl
Seboo Migone
'Hunter', 2007, Oil on canvas, 170 x 200 cm

 

Seboo Migone's paintings are accumulative families in which the 'odd-one outness' of each character is balanced against the other. The human character, the landscape and the still life merge in unexpected combinations. Psychological and naturalistic colour is of equal importance in shaping paintings that record the shift between internal and external worlds, the passage between night and day. Artists who explored the transition from figuration to abstraction and vice versa, such as Vassily Kandinsky and Philip Guston, are of interest to Migone. The contrast between purity and impurity, the balance between fairy tale and horror, needs to be re-dressed every day. A pure yellow becomes adulterated by going over it with a purple, turns into earth, wet paint over wet paint. Physical properties of paint and its powers to evoke, makes oil paint stretchable. Images emerge out of an involvement with paint and surface, and are unpremeditated, born out of colours blending over each other.  

In recent work scheming heads intrude on peaceful settings, hunters are caught scared, tourists turn into monsters, mountains hide faces and, only rarely, the landscape is devoid of disturbances. A very strong influence in his work is to acknowledge children. As Migone says, ‘their anarchic impulse has crept under my skin’.