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From: Ken Johnson Category: Art Date: 27 September 2007 Time: 02:05 PM Review: The large canvases in Jonathan Polkests exhibition "Cornish Guilt" at Moonbowjakes Gallery Bar in South Londons Brockley Road, bring a cool aura of structured restraint to the otherwise cavernous gallery bar but the more you look, the more interesting the work becomes. Mr Polkest who is 40 and lives in England has been compared to many of Londons contemporary artists and more often to the German new wave that emerged during the late eighties and nineties. The hard edged images on quite large canvas bases, often characterised with a linear definition possess a subtle, oblique way of mixing image, form and idea. But Mr Polkests paintings have their own rough formal presence and understated eccentricities bringing a bright spark of risk back into the prevalence for wholesale endorsement in an otherwise tedious introspective knowing reception comittee. What Cornish Guilt actually is, appears to remain unexplained by the paintings which depict some vehicles, one is a Cornish Ice Cream Van, titled Corpus Christie Fair and with my limited knowledge I can point to the analogy of christs body, which I think could be a christian feastday in Cornwall. There is a canvas of a large Mobile Library Van with "A Service from Cornwall" emblazoned on the livery, its a textile image made with yarn and lace. A sly interplay of abstraction and representation activates the canvases, In the image of a Road Machine a Landscape emerges an optical jazz of vertical lines conspire to evince some of the most current and influentiasl works I have seen in a long time.