Review: Pure magic on display at Rugby gallery

Through either luck or good judgement, the current exhibition at Rugby School’s splendid Lewis gallery features a selection of portraits by John Devane (current runner-up of the prestigious BP Portrait Award) while his prizewinning painting is still on show at the National Portrait Gallery.

The painting itself is of necessity restricted to playing a bit-part here in the catalogue, where it seems to haunt proceedings in its absence. It features his three children in a dynamic composition that finds an echo in other works around the gallery walls. In The Contract, for instance, his adolescent son strikes a defiant pose that’s reinforced by the triangular shape of his hunched upper body, lit by the glow of an inevitable laptop.

His wife and two other children also play their part, but it’s not all family and friends. There are some fine painterly studies where the artist takes the imagery beyond the confines of domesticity without appearing to ever leave the house. In Death of Marat, a jumble of TV screens invites speculation about the meaning of such an iconic reference which is anchored down by a briefly glimpsed but perfectly observed table top. It’s the painterly fluency that does it. In Call of Duty and Black Hawk Down, we’re in an apparent war zone conjured up by dynamic brushwork that animates what turns out to be a set of toy soldiers fighting it out on a hastily configured table-top.

These fleeting glimpses suit his style. His wizardry with the brush allows him to manoeuvre accurately at speed. Form, colour, tone - it’s all there, revealing the subject-matter at a fly-by pace. At its very best, it’s pure magic, but even at its less than best, it’s still strikingly good.

Peter McCarthy