Sally O’Reilly, ‘Michael Stubbs at Entwistle Gallery’, London, UK, Time Out, 23-30, 2002

Sticking with the fecund subject of food, Michael Stubbs has moved on from his impasto, cake-like paintings to flat graphic images of orange halves and meat cuts.  Idealised line drawings of lamb chops are used as stencils; tinted floor varnish is then poured over and the stencils removed to create a negative or absent ingredient.  The process is halfway between control and serendipity.  The result - a combination of clean lines and biomorphic pools of colour - is the fusion of Patrick Caulfield and Gary Hume.  By changing the direction of the pouring, Stubbs alters the way in which we impose context.  When the movement is upwards, the poured blobs become like containers, figures or exotic vegetables; when downwards, they imply contamination.  A vivid turquoise, the only non-food colour in these images, moves malignly through the warm browns and oranges like a demonstration of chemical efficacy in an advert for cleaning products.

The paintings veer towards the decorative by way of their Pop imagery and chromatic tastefulness; they are like a reworking of a Rosenquist encountered with rubber gloves on.  But, by folding Pop into abstract expressionism and reducing nature to signs, Stubbs creates a feedback loop of references.  Food has a chequered array of significance throughout the history of painting, but despite the ladlefuls of idealism and the aroma of consumer hegemony, Stubbs seems more manipulative than most foodies.