about

Paul Duncan was born in London in 1966. He studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art in London, receiving his MA in 1993. He has shown in galleries across Europe and America and his work is held in private collections in London, Berlin, Geneva, New York and Los Angeles. After a spell teaching in Zambia in the late nineties, the National Gallery in Lusaka purchased some of his paintings for their permanent collection.

Duncan's paintings are confrontational portraits of metaphysical humanoid creatures, part-man, part-deity, part- freak, set in weird landscapes (Hermaphrodite...1998, Munk - 2001). InBarber-que - 2001 the remnants of a dead city looms in the background as tribal figures, grotesque and worrying, eyeball the viewer with deranged expressions, like the zombie devotees of Mr Kurtz' rag-tag army. These images have a terrible beauty about them.

In 2002 He moved to New York. In this new environment Duncan was able to work a playful painterly game and develop further his visual language - a kind of British magic realism rooted in both the bucolic and, conversely, a Ballardian sensibility. Teeming with images of existential terror and psychedelic visions of madness and entropy, work like All Human Thought Flattened There In Present Time - 2007exists in a Nature-bound apocalypse filled with air-borne menace (birds, planes, the sun). In Longen Folk to Goon On Pilgrimages - 2005 a terrifying psychic battle is being fought between a bearded protagonist, a rabid-looking dog and a moon-faced four-armed deity. The Burroughs/ Gysin style cut ups Duncan creates for titles suggest narcotic derangement. Scrying and orgone generators.

In these recent paintings and drawings the ghosts of Daumier, Bosch, Goya and Blake are apparent. The delicate brushwork of A Glimmer Of Hope And Life And Death On A Darkening Earth - 2007suggests an unexpected affinity with the work of British Neo-Romantic Graham Sutherland, with its muted palette and fine loose application of paint.

The artist is obliquely familiar with the landscapes he paints, but upon them he transposes a strange reality in which even stranger things are happening. Often containing a solitary mad prophet, animalized form or suffering saint-like figure, trapped in a thicket or boiling in a cauldron (a reoccurring motif) - these canvases are freighted with portents, like the opium dreams of a Stylite playing out in the Vale of Avalon, a South London Street or the blood-red deserts of Zambia. In tune with the times we live in Duncan's work reflects how we exist today, not in a permanent present but in the future - the future we have inflicted upon ourselves spiritually, environmentally and economically; no longer able to trace the present and thence powerless to control our destiny any more.

Andrew Scott-Bolton, February 2009 - Divine Agency London