Frederick Ingoldby

Notable Achievements 2021
Frederick Ingoldby - recipient of the Freelands Painting Prize 2021.

What are these paintings? Past documents of future imaginings? They have a curiously archival feel; each pivoting to face a set of questions about a social environment so fully industrialized there is hardly an inkling of nature in them. ‘Dodgy Suspension’ is a cinematic stage – spotlighted foreground, dark background. The artist’s hand at work is not particularly visible in the brushwork, and this glassy surface lends to the idea that this scene is removed from everyday life, representative rather of a set of artistic conventions, such as the iconography the artist draws on. That said, the subjects are not sacred here but denizens of an eternally normal, televised present; the artist uses iconography for distinctly modern ends like maverick Swiss painter Ricco Wassmer. Your curiosity is piqued about the characters, yet you feel you already know their stories.

The receding perspective as much as the figures crawling along the tracks with wheels protruding from their heads evokes a sense of mechanical ennui in Mechanical Failure of Rolling Stock. This bizarre imagery provokes – what? Should we laugh at their predicament, or weep? The detached neutrality of the paint’s application itself gives no direction. It's up to the viewer to decide how they feel about what they see. Perhaps the clue is in neutrality in Your Head Isn’t as Big as it Looks in the Mirror: is the subject’s warped perspective something to do with the quality of his everyday? He's a splice between a Lewis Carroll character and the protagonist from American Beauty. Note the simple device of splitting the painting across two canvases, another citation of the format of religious iconography – assimilated to the less rarefied tones of the 9-5. Finally, we have an ironical depiction of a polluting ‘übermensch’ in 80 Mile Drive; the claustrophobia of the smudging smoke and the eyeless face of the man registering deep unease, whilst not foregoing the lighter, filmic touch of characterisation and scene. And you, do you experience any uncanny recognition?