Evan Salmon’s work is intense with severe momentum.  Your eyes feel on the alert.  Swept along, you recognise intimate but unreliably indistinct details – a cog?  a spoke?  a whole factory?  These fugitive images flash like memories across the work; they are enigmatic, ghostly.  We come to feel haunted, just as Salmon must be, by machines; by their formal beauty, their satisfying efficiency, their minimal elegance.  Are these photographs Salmon has taken, or are they collected from books?  Heavily pixilated, they look like newspaper cuttings, and consequently seem to have a history and an urgency.  Some are menacing.  But then, suddenly, your gaze is snapped away to the surface to follow the seductive paint – bright, oily – that ultimately fails to cover the piece of ply beneath it.  Some areas of the work seem to be so corroded they look like an ancient frieze, others like yesterday’s ads, replaced already: weathered messages, scarred, re-adorned, all intuitively balanced – seemingly effortlessly – on the edge of legibility.

 

These one-off incomplete images, photographically screen printed using oil paint onto irregular pieces of ply, have the immediacy of the gestural marks that surround them.  But the intimacy of these marks is always tempered by the reserve of the machine parts.  While the paint echoes the motion of the machines hinted at, their background hum gives this uncompromising work a clarity that comes from its pure, exacting inner logic.