43 Inverness Street is pleased to announce Draw The Poison, an exhibition of new works by Fabian Peake. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Peake’s works consist of painting, text and wall pieces. There is a sense of animation and humour, compelling us to construct order within the apparent disorder. The juxtaposition of these various elements – text, Morse code, geometry, abstract and figurative images – causes friction and awkwardness at the conflicting visual information. Words don’t add up to create a clear sentence or become veiled in layers of paint; handwritten mathematical formulae fail to provide clear answers; images are placed on the canvas as if they were a deliberate afterthought. An atmosphere of transience prevails.

The ground floor features paintings hung in an experimental fashion; pushed together, tilted or hung halfway off the wall. Surprising juxtapositions and associations are created as the compositions seesaw between abstraction and figuration. ‘Red Stare’ (2014), a rectangular wall piece of eggshell paint on plywood, portrays a grid of drilled holes. The tongue-in-cheek title implies that the work is looking at the viewer. A large mural created specifically for the gallery ‘Whispering in Sumatra’ (2014) features layers of handwritten text where some words rise to the surface while others are half-hidden and illegible. The very act of writing is raised in importance as concrete meaning is avoided.

The first floor contains two striking works facing one another that present conflicting visual information. In ‘The Back of Your Face’ (2014), words are represented by Morse code in a series of wooden dots and dashes that span across the wall. Even if one were to understand the code, one would quickly realise that while the individual words have meaning, together they don’t form a syntax. Complete understanding is elusive. On the opposite wall hangs a painted wooden work ‘Skrane’ (2014) in the shape of a polygon. Numbers are placed in the corners of the shape as if they refer to geometric analysis while a carved text is placed on the surface. These mathematical and verbal aspects propose that the measurements correspond to the degrees of the angles and that the text conveys a message, yet the numbers do not add up and the words are invented.

These works evoke an egalitarian spirit in their use of non-logic and disorder. All viewers are capable of constructing order; there is no secret knowledge.

Fabian Peake has shown his work widely, both in the U.K. and in Europe, China, the U.S.A., Mexico and the Dominican Republic. He has been Artist in Residence in Dallas, Texas and in Guanajuato, Mexico. He has lectured and given talks all over the U.K. and in the U.S.A., Europe and Mexico. He has published pamphlets of poetry and had many poems published in magazines and journals. A comprehensive book of his poetry, ‘LOOSE MONK’ will be published later this year (2014).