TIM Goulding's latest show at the Rubicon is called Elements, perhaps as disheartening a title as any show could bear. The word conjures up a romantic world of imposing natural forces, sublime topographical features and portentous painting. Even more dishearteningly, this sort of thing is exactly what shows up in Goulding's show.
The artist's style involves using a number of different painting techniques, ranging from a hypersmooth, airbrushed appearance, to images which involve the fixing of rock dust and sand to the canvas.
Allied with this style switching manoeuvre, the painter also moves back and forward through figurative and abstracted forms, placing, for example, an almost photorealistic representation of some rushes, or of a crepuscular sky, beside textured passages of an abstract nature.
Fire and earth, water and sand, all get a look in, as does no end of blazing heather or bog and many of the props of traditional landscape painting. The artist's strategy to disguise his affiliation with rather straightforward landscape work is to split up his canvases, offering a series of slices arranged in such a way as to superimpose a modernist sheen.
Unfortunately, here the main effect of these split frames is to make the gallery space look far too small. The hang is admittedly a cramped one, but Goulding's pieces have nowhere near the power to overcome what might have been a minor distraction.
