Sarah Douglas, Hypersurface, Rod Barton Invites, London, UK, Turps Banana Exhibition Review (excerpt),

March – October 2008

(Ian Monroe, Michael Stubbs, Caragh Thuring)

Hypersurface at Rod Barton Invites sought to explore painting’s relationship to the virtual and digital world. The show brought together the work of three artists and questioned how we engage with the language of the hand-made physical object as it exists with respect to the ‘non-space’ of the flat world of digital media and the computer screen…

… Common to both Monroe’s work and Michael Stubbs’ Virus Interfacer (2007) is the propensity for the graphical simplicity of their imagery to belie the complexity of their working and thinking methods. We are easily seduced by the slickness of Stubbs’ surface, where intense fields of colour vibrate against translucent varnishes and pours of paint. This painting might be enjoyed on a purely sensory level, and very pleasurable it would be too, were it not for the rogue elements that interject, disrupt the paintings fluidity and jar the image and our reading of it. This painting has a history, and residues of its previous incarnations remain, barely visible, hovering like clouds or shadows between the layers… Stubbs and Monroe present us with coherently rendered mappings of their readings of non-space.