Just because Richard Amend makes abstractions it doesn’t mean they are not allowed to represent, to narrate, to express and to describe. This dazzling and shiny new work is both confident and tentative, continuing his long practice and also revisiting the origins of that practice, recasting it in the light of its own history and allowing itsef to be influenced by that history. His phantasmagorical Cubist Blues is, like much cubism, based on rotation and division of space.

The reflective surfaces in the installation recall the mirrors of the palace of Versailles and they also express the artist’s reflection (thought) on his own beginnings: that moment when the brain thickens but retains the liberating freshness of the beginner. The work is blue in color, it refers to musical Blues, it might also be sad, and it is not afraid to be fun-house flamboyant. Almost like the shutter of a SLR camera, one expects the petals to open and close, or to blink like eyelids. It creates the effect of an encounter between one eyeball and another.