"As is painting so is poetry" - Norman Rea Gallery - until 12/02/10

Langwith's latest exhibition

Contrary to the title of the exhibition none of the word-saturated pieces have any rhythmic or consonantal resonance, and the only piece that really seemed to touch upon its subject was one inspired by Moby Dick, although the identity of Ishmael, or even Quequeeg for that matter, was impossible to ascertain from this, rather crude, cliché of a pirate ship.

The poetry element is still puzzling me as I write this. Expecting to see, perhaps, a vernacular representation of Ted Hughes’ night-fox or a passage from Dante illustrated for the ill-acquainted, I instead find something apparently traced from an illustrative page of Indian art history of the 5th to 7th centuries.

Around the corner, you’ll be either surprised or disappointed to learn, the show goes on with about half a dozen pencil-drawn pictures of uncertain subject, none of which I am sure represents anything passively romantic or even post-modernist. I had friends who executed far more developed pieces for A level Art and still came away with D grades, so what must have been intended as an abstract social critique Wikipedia was nothing more than an entirely unnecessary composite of unrelated religious iconography from Egypt, India, and I suppose the bowling balls must have represented the US, which had no real bearing on art or on poetry.

One person who benefitted from the show’s absence of poetical bearing was Yorkshire poet Gareth Durasow. The lack of any real planning on the art’s part helped make his butchery of adjectives and crude, obvious, often redundant, imagery seem almost eloquent compared to a show that in all probability was made from art students doodles. It was a far cry away from the scientific, sculptured, pieces of David Fitzpatrick in Place Making and my favourite thing about the whole exhibition is that it means that follow-up show HANDMADE is only 20 days from opening

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