David Lillington, ‘Michael Stubbs at Nicola Jacobs Gallery’, London, UK, Time Out, March 6-13, 1991

A Michael Stubbs painting looks like an iced cake turned on its side and hung on the wall.  It is box-shaped - 12” square, 8”deep - and consists of five canvases, squashed on to one another, paint oozing out between them.  Most of the canvas is hidden and what can be seen is coated in sickly whorls of pink, purple, yellow, electric blue or black, applied with an icing syringe.  What makes these objects good is that they do and do not look like paintings and that they show a finely tuned lack of respect: they are irreverent about that sacred thing, the painted canvas.  At the same time they are luscious and tactile - the gallery is having difficulty preventing visitors from touching them.  They are intelligent and funny - ‘art referencing art’ in the most coquettish way.  Stubbs’s next problem, I imagine, is what to do next.  These ‘stacked canvases’ are such a neat idea that it’s hard to see how he can pull off a similar trick, with the same impact.  But that remains to be seen.