Tim Lokiec

Woman Dematerialising in a Swamp picks up on the artist's interest in the pregnant female form. A lone figure strides through the night, covered to her shins in a treacly mass identified in the painting's title as a shallow swamp. Behind her stands a tree, above her its branches. Fiction and reality collide as brightly coloured leaves and birds, perhaps freed from the cage that hangs before her face, are collaged into the scene. The dematerialisation comes by way of her ghostly transparency, as she literally sinks into her surrounds. Resin Sex Style retains the frenetic sexual theme of the earlier painting, while paring down the composition to relieve congestion and give the characters some room within the canvas. The work has a noticeably filmic quality, evoking the chronophotographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and the Cubist paintings depicting figures in motion by Marcel Duchamp that borrowed so cleverly from them. A slim, angular figure appears to be caught in a series of poses as he moves from a standing position at left to one kneeling at right. Midway through, in his most bodily depiction, he seems to be lost in a moment of regret, shame or intense feeling. Lokiec deliberately accentuates the two-dimensionality of the picture plane by pasting pages from his sketchbook arbitrarily to its surface, and laying down a series of decorative, abstract patterns with his paintbrush. Mental Door is a frenzied, claustrophobic depiction of naked figures engaged in graphic sexual acts. The earliest of a series of works by the artist characterized by their explicit subject matter, it is a composite of a number of smaller preparatory sketches. The paint is applied with deliberate abandon to convey a sense of messy, bodily urgency, as the protagonists, prominent among which is a conspicuously pregnant woman at left, crowd the picture's foreground. Staring out at us with wide, startled eyes, they seem almost to have been caught in the act. Acidic washes of colour create the impression of some kind of drug-induced adolescent fantasy, hurriedly scribbled in a moment of unconscious desire.