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From: Antonio Proudhomme Category: Art Date: 21 June 2008 Time: 06:10 AM Review: We need new critical terms which relate to actual experience of making and seeing art. How about OVERWORKED, not more than occasionally used, it could describe this entire exhibition. OVERWORKED does not mean the same as working hard or carefully (it may be the result of the opposite) more an end surface which makes you think of lots of accumulated decisions none which seem exactly right. It is the difference between a Piero and some of his minor contemporaries. It is most vividly seen in events like the National Portrait competition, where through a crisis in confidence about portraiture, most of the artists are desperately trying to exhume information from photos or observation without an intellectual structure to support their activity or looking. I suppose Matisse, who reworked a lot, would represent the opposite of OVERWORKED, his final pictures look as though they were painted with great certainty and each mark seems right and could be no better, and painted as with one stroke. The Divisionists, and the national portrait competition are backwaters, and rightly so, but in these murky swamps we see the failures which define the glowing beauty of what is not OVERWORKED, that which is actual art.