Soft Touch

Leon Scott-Engel 22 June - 5 August 2023

Although there’s a lot of painting around at the moment and a lot of it, shall we say, leaves something to be desired, I had never literally wanted to clench my fist and punch straight through one – that is, until I visited the show of Leon Scott-Engel, Handle With Care, on at Pipeline Contemporary till the fifth of August.

This was, in fact, a sign that the paintings were working. Appropriating the shape of a pair of boxing training pads, complete with white target circles in the middle, Rose Tinted invites an aggressive response, albeit a controlled, sporty kind of aggression. This contrasts with the quality of the paintings: delicate smoky renderings of two lovers kissing, or of soft and intimate body parts. A viewer’s response is therefore conflicted, in suspense between the punchability of the support and the gentleness of its content.

One of the most effective techniques of painting is to produce a desire for sensual engagement (how many times have you wanted to lick or eat a painting?) while denying the audience the opportunity to satisfy that carnal desire. We are led into the more rarefied realm of the aesthetic, which requires more effort from us but which, I’d argue, can extend its effects over a much longer period of time – years, even whole lifetimes.

Scott-Engel adapts this technique to meditate on the idea of masculinity. Masculinity is signalled elsewhere in the show by another boxing pad-shaped canvas, Skin on Skin, on which there is a picture of two boxers fighting, and a large painted punchbag, Swole. In the dark basement, somewhat bluntly, a series of wax models of the artist’s own head flash SOS in colourful morse code, as if alerting the audience to the often unspoken fragility of men’s mental health.

It would be an overstatement to say that the work in Handle With Care achieves a lifetime’s worth of aesthetic pleasure. With support and image both referring to boxing, Skin on Skin’s internal dialogue generates less friction and less suspense than Rose Tinted. Trace is a curved canvas painted illusionistically to resemble a mattress, bent up between the floor and the wall, one which are also painted what look like hazy, out-of-focus human figures. Again, this seems to confirm, rather than enlarge, our prior ideas about mattresses, or gentleness, and what these things might mean or represent.

AbEx this ain’t; and in general the art of painting is still, at least to the wider world, something practised and studied by a sensitive kind of person, not your typical alpha male. Some of the most satisfying moments in this exhibition are, therefore, the small paintings on rough wooden boards, which provide a visual equivalent to scratching an itch. No matter how soft, a show about masculinity – if that word is to retain any of its meaning – is also going to have to give us hard. It is at moments of contrast such as this, and the boxing/kissing combinations, that the theme seems most fully, and effectively, developed.

Handle With Care is at Pipeline 22 June - 5 August 2023