Press

There is a stillness about the eye created by these paintings that allows you to take your time with the surfaces, textures and shapes in Michael Clark's representations of Paris and Barcelona. The pleasure of looking at them might seem to have everything to do with surfaces and textures yet they bring to us a rare quality of patient attentiveness.

There is a kind of active commemoration of the moments of enjoyment afforded by a coffee in the afternoon, the visual fabric of a wall, precisely as it differs in sunlight and shadow. Clark delivers something onto the canvas more than mere depiction. This something is to do with poise, held and fixed in the pigment. It gives you a quiet sense of the affirmation of residence: the feeling, "Yes. That's what it's like".

Professor Alan Riach,
University of Glasgow, April 2005