Andrew Stahl, who is represented by the fashionable Flowers East Gallery, went east himself to the countries of the Golden Triangle and returned with his mind suffused with the implications of memories of the huge and placid statues of the Buddha which dominate calm corners of ancient lands otherwise transformed by gunship helicopters and western skyscrapers.
Thus many of his huge paintings in his current return visit to the Fenderesky, achieved by adding quick wet layer upon quick wet layer of paint, are dominated by recollected, transmuted images of the young and serene Buddha, at once asexual and bisexual.
In other works Stahl recaptures the massive proportions of these huge statues by filling a canvas with just a portion of the face set against the sky, or of a fragment of a leg.
In the background his skies can be at once ethereal, eternal and passive, a night sprinkled with stars. In further images of his odalisques the eastern skies reflect on the region's more recent, more troubled, history, flecked as they are with little toy bombers, gunships, rockets and missiles spiralling and falling from above an emergent mix of coolie hats, skyscrapers, pagodas and Mammon's emissaries of the West's invasion.
Runs until August 6th