West End exhibition: Tomas Watson Drawing Painting | Jill George gallery | David Gleeson | BP Portrait Award | John Fowles | Francis Bacon

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The Review - FEATURE - WEST END EXHIBITION
Published: 26 June 2009

Detail: Body Studies, oil & charcoal, 100x210cm by Tomas Watson

Beyond mere cuts
of meat

TOMAS WATSON DRAWING PAINTING
Jil George Gallery

TOMAS Watson first appeared on the art radar when he won the prestigious BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 1998.
He was subsequently commissioned by the gallery to paint a portrait of author John Fowles.
Watson studied anatomy at art school so besides being a highly skilled portrait and landscape painter he also paints – almost obsessively – the human body.
Since the mid-1990s he has lived and worked in Greece, sending canvases to London to be sold at Jill George in Soho.
This latest show again presents a selection of paintings that are technically and compositionally brilliant as well as beautiful.
The title of the exhibition alludes to the way the artist has incorporated the original under-drawing into some of the finished works, with the result that perfectly painted torsos emerge from the paint and charcoal around them, appearing to coalesce into photorealistic figures.
The effects are luminous and spectacular.
Like that other great chronicler of flesh, Francis Bacon, parts of human bodies are presented here like choice cuts of meat.
Unlike Bacon, however, Watson’s paintings do not labour the metaphor and his depictions of the body are always elegantly whole rather than apparently butchered.
The show includes images of an elderly Greek friend of the artist whose body has not aged particularly well.
But the artist’s careful rendering of his wrinkled skin reminds us that all humans, no matter how old or dissipated, have an essential dignity.
For this alone he has replaced that other famous Londoner, Lucien Freud, as my favourite painter of flesh.

• Tomas Watson: Drawing Painting: Paintings and Works on Paper, is at Jill George Gallery, 38 Lexington Street, Soho, W1.020 7439 7319.
Until July 17.

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