The following essay, by William Pym, was published in the monograph commemorating Street turns river, Christof Mascher's third exhibition at the gallery.

Christof Mascher’s Street turns river, a 2015 painting in oil on board, is an urban nocturne washed with the pale purply blue that belongs only to a clear night beneath a big moon. Gas streetlamps set cream-coloured orbs on either side of the scene, repoussoir glass gems from a European city of the 1820s. A boulevard carves through the landscape, parcelling it up. The painting is tight, everything in its proper place. It’s a resolved and formally locked-in rectangle, but isn’t showy about it. It’s just a little thing, a romantic but unremarkable scene. Nothing important is happening. It’s winter. Mascher paints bare trees and iron railings here with the casually virtuosic stickwork of Raoul Dufy or Ludwig Bemelmans, the language of Impressionism and illustration. It is an easy, masterful sketch.

Then, in a dragging, unhurried brushstroke with a jiggle in it, the street turns river. Narrative begins. The scene is now both apocalyptic and Edenic. An outline of a canoe emerges from a shadow. Two obsidian blobs in the background could be whales. They look happy. Where are we? Are we in endtimes, after the flood? Or are we coexisting with nature, in a peaceful parallel universe, uncorrupted in its infancy?

Christof Mascher’s initial art practice, in the 1990s, was large-scale graffiti on trains in Northern Germany. There he is on a samizdat VHS compilation, left-handed, spraycan dancing over the green skin of a Stadtbahn car. The camera shakes, the Beastie Boys ask what cha want. Mascher’s edited part is about two minutes long. The whole tag, a few metres wide, only took a few minutes more. There isn’t much time to work in broad daylight.

It is dangerous to bring up graffiti. Not because graffiti is transgressive, antisocial or illegal. Far from it. The opposite. It’s dangerous because the same tribe of artists of whom in 1974 Norman Mailer wrote “the beginning of another millennium of expression may be with them . . . for we do not know with what instruments we will draw in years to come” have now, in those years to come, become marketable and been made polite. An artform fueled by futurism, poetry and revolution is now easily approximated and often overwhelmed by canned versions of itself. A rerouting happened at a moment in 1980s New York when the art world placed graffiti in the lineage of Pop art, and while Pop will remain current as long as Capitalism flourishes, advanced consumer culture is not necessarily of interest or relevant to graffiti. Graffiti is now part of a commercial hydra called street art, and street art is a big-money hustle and its own parallel art world, a cottage industry and a ghetto. The street art thing is short on discourse. It’s mostly about attitude, theatre and basic iconography. It’s uncool and a drag. This is the reason that graffiti is kept away from contemporary art catalog essays.

We claim and explicitly acknowledge graffiti in this contemporary art catalog essay, however, because it is essential to our understanding of Christof Mascher. Graffiti, at its best and most beautiful, is about reacting to the environment and finding a private space to create within it, with freedom and joy. Mascher’s painting practice is about this sort of dexterity and liberation. And, just like graffiti, Mascher paints with no rules. He is antagonistic and gorgeous, goofy, tight, whatever. He paints from inside the work, finding a pocket, by himself, where anything can happen. Street turns river, etc.

Mascher is a painter of landscape, of built environments set in nature that are both microcosmic and epic in scale. They refuse to exist anywhere particular or at any particular time. There are two dozen utopias—in the original Thomas More sense of “no-places”—in this exhibition. Here are some of them. Loom depicts a twinkling night in a tiny hilltop cathedral town. The centre of the scene distorts slightly as if seen through a lens; a hot viridian sunset does not resemble any sunset on earth. North Bend is a faceted mountainside that chisels formally to a cone, an old-school chunk of primal geometry like Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire or Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. It is also, perhaps, the bobbing hills of Malibu, or a 3D environment in a video game where people stalk around and shoot each other dead. The mountain is surrounded by raw canvas, emphasising its inability to commit to a larger world. Pool I — a work that, like Loom, shines with a topcoat of glossy, home-made lacquer—is a fetid swamp in a tropical place, tinged with chemical hues. Maybe Vietnam, dyed weird by Agent Orange or Orange Sunshine, maybe a primordial ooze, somewhere ancient. The tubular ladder on the water’s back lip leads us to leisure, somewhere wealthy and in our time.

Yes, another small glossy work, is a landscape with an etched, flat foreground, rendering the scene something like a geological cross-section. The bottom third of the painting is covered by a hieroglyphic, relief-like rendering of a 1950s ice-cream cart and a thatch of flowers. The top third has a written note, in blue pen, that reads ‘Yt Modern Master / 9:00 Matisse.’ It seems to be a note written in haste on a surface next to a telephone, a reminder to meet Matisse for breakfast at nine. I mentioned this to Mascher, who found this amusing, then clarified that it is a marker of the nine-minute mark in some good footage of Matisse on YouTube. It is a crazy, messy painting, and this crazy painting still reads as a landscape. A suite of small watercolours, a new style for the artist, combine florid soaks of colour with articulated graphic lines, creating an array of architectural cues from robust Tudor timber to Carpenter’s Gothic. Graphics define the scenes and keep the inherently goopy medium sharp, but their role is not fixed. Sometimes the lines take over. Douglas fir, a cabin in the woods with a lantern-carrying ghost at the door, is overcome by the titular trees, creating the beginnings of a textile herringbone choking the surface.

Walden, the largest of the recent works exhibited in Street turns river, is a stacked, dense vista. Everything appears to be very near. Distance looks tangible — the next bump, just across the valley, that tight soundstage space of the sort you can traverse and get to the back of in Neoclassical paintings. But you can’t grab it or reach it at all. A pocket valley scene becomes something giant. It is verdant European country, green over chalky hills. The sky is pale. The light is flat and antiseptic, there’s very little yellow anywhere in the painting. It is a sculpted landscape, quarried and shaved. There is a colossal monument to a man in flowing Roman robes in the middle distance. A docile squirrel, approximately the size of a single-storey house, rests on his forearm. Round white forms bounce and echo back through the terrain. There are globe streetlamps in the foreground, a series of white eggs and

balls placed through the fields, intimating Magritte and frivolous 18th-century garden ornaments alike, and the moon — or perhaps another, even larger monument — nestled on the furthest peak. There’s a few small communities and farms. There’s a row of buildings along a bluff, Colonial in appearance, with columns and covered porches. It’s a deceptive painting. Walden is encyclopedic in scale, depicting an entire society, yet it reads like romantic landscape painting, let’s call it personal discovery painting, Caspar David Friedrich or Frederic Church, the kind of painting with two guys standing on slopes pointing at nature. The painting constantly shifts in scale. It is both a moment and a world.

The venerable American critic and art historian Hal Foster’s new précis of themes in western art of the past 25 years, Bad New Days, describes a contemporary mood of dislocation and numbness brought about by the trauma of violence, the dehumanising effects of technology and the diffusion and erosion of intellectual authority. He paints a picture of chaos and emotional emergency. Certain strains of contemporary figurative art edge toward pure abjection, the state of a wound that won’t heal as opposed to the closure of a corpse, the way ongoing war with Islam keeps memories of September 11th fresh. At another end of recent art practice Foster notes that the popular artistic tendency toward the archival, a noble aim to write new accurate histories, at times share qualities with Freud’s designation of paranoia — a practice of forced connections and projecting one’s own meaning on the world as a balm. Performance art is lionised and precious to the contemporary art world for its connection to the body, yet many of its latest incarnations are ambient and ultimately depressing, like watching television for company. Scholarship and discourse are considered impediments in certain corners of a postcritical landscape, creating meaningless discussions that lack foremen or stenographers. Indeed, in the book’s only nakedly emotional moment, Foster issues a steaming, prophetic warning about what would happen if people stopped reading art writing and philosophy. In total, Foster’s aesthetic landscape is one of confusion and desperation for a connection.

The state we’re in is a symptom of real-world turmoil, for sure, but in aesthetic terms it’s a symptom of Postmodernism and its uncertain legacy. Postmodernism was an era of creation without reproach, an era of total possibility. Its rejection of doctrine and rules provided an opportunity to see the artistic impulse as a rhizome rather than a road, growing in multiple directions, progressing on alternative trajectories to the stubborn straight ahead of Modernism yet still being positive. It was a good, wild time, but through institutionalisation and market forces it became its own conservative opposite, another walled-in, pedantic empire. It ceased to be about things; it grew to mostly be about itself. You may draw a comparison here to graffiti and street art, if you like. It’s the feeling of getting to the end of a great journey with the only option of doubling back and doing it again.

In a recent interview with Jörg Heiser, the German painter Daniel Richter notes that many of the themes in this year’s major contemporary painting state-of-the-union survey The Forever Now at MoMA in New York have been present in Albert Oehlen’s painting since 1992. “When I look at contemporary painting,” he says, “I find it interesting and intelligent. But I can’t fight the feeling I’m also being told how painting works, and the result is too clever for it’s own good.” What do we want painting to be after Postmodernism? How do we reengage with the world? The art state we’re in now has us dazed, waking up from a party and in need of a plan for the day ahead. You don’t anticipate a hangover when you’re having a good time.

Christof Mascher matured in the twilight of Postmodern art, in Germany, the country that developed the most and the best Postmodern art — from Beuys to Genzken, Knoebel, Krebber, Immendorff, von Bonin, Palermo, Polke, Kippenberger, an astonishing diversity of makers. And Mascher knows his roots first-hand, having studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Braunschweig under Walter Dahn, an anchor of the 1980s German avant-garde and paragon of ‘bad painting’ via the early and important Mülheimer Freiheit group in Cologne. Mascher understands the adversarial position of the Postmodern artist, the enduring ‘disruption’ vibe holding over from Situationism. He understands that attitude, but is of a new generation. He wants more. While the internet endures as the supreme realisation of the Postmodern dream and defines the freedoms of the Millenial generation,

Mascher seeks alternative freedoms of expression that are always tied to presence in the world. This is the graffiti artist’s impulse, and the worldview that Mascher has built through his painting practice. His work is about recognition and cognition: recognition is absorbing the landscape from being in it; cognition is the engine to invent new forms within it. Mascher builds the landscape anew while reacting to its foundations. He values presence above all.

Mascher values the land, and is thankful for the fact he is free to use it as he pleases. “In Germany, it was all about where you lived at the moment they built the border,” he writes. “I was ten years old when the wall came down. I watched it on TV, and all over Germany we had these poor fellas from the east trying to buy as much jeans, cigarettes and bananas as possible.” Mascher is grateful for the ability to live in the land and enjoy its inspiration. He needs to be an artist, but he doesn’t want to retreat, escape, problematise or render the world obscure. His art is good art for our time.

Shortly after the opening of Half-Lowered Eyelids, his first solo exhibition at Josh Lilley in January 2019, Gareth Cadwallader left his South London home to paint in the world. A painter with a meticulous, private methodology in art and life, the following images are all that we know about the genesis of the works ultimately presented at Art Basel Miami Beach in December of that year.

Under the auspices of service and through the community of yogis and healers connected to his partner, Cadwallader's travels took him to Spain, Greece, Indonesia, India and Thailand. These provisional studios are long gone, and Cadwallader has told us little about them. Their support and their effects live on in these photographs alone and somewhere in the three works they yielded — works we met when we hung them in the global village of new ideas and recirculated air, the Miami Beach Convention Center.

SHELTER, Derek Fordjour's 2020 solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, was both a compact survey of the artist's recent work and a site-specific installation that placed the viewer in a position of temporary safety from a heavy storm. Corrugated metal walls, a dirt floor and a sound piece mimicking the effect of rain on a tin roof suggested the thinnest of thresholds between the self and a turbulent world outside.

SHELTER brought together paintings and sculpture from disparate series made over the past four years, populating the provisional structure with the artist's full cast of players. Per the museum's extensive curator's guide, "Fordjour uses the metaphor and pageantry of sport as a way of considering questions of marginalization and inequity in America. The artist’s paintings explore both the vulnerability and strategy required of individuals as they navigate legacies of injustice and socio-political bias. Cheerleaders in splits, drum majors in backbends, athletes posing in awkward groups—these paintings convey an uneasy feeling of display and exposure. The artist sheds light on the pressures of exceptionalism and performance, while questioning the extent to which trailblazing figures are truly able to disrupt patterns of long-standing systemic inequality in the US."

2017's Rally Finale, one of the artist's iconic crowd paintings — drawing inspiration from Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Auguste Renoir's Bal du Moulin de la Galette in equal meaure — was a pointed inclusion in the exhibition. "In crowd series paintings like Rally Finale," the notes explain, "the figures are squeezed into a chock-a-block formation. The closeness of the figures reveals a tension between difference and sameness. The connectedness and relation of people to one another is undeniable. Each figure overlaps another regardless of race, social class, bias, or political preference. This particular work was created in early 2017 as a response to the transition from the Obama to the Trump administration, a time of political upheaval and unrest, and during the peak moments of a changing of the guard." In the back half of 2020, the dichotomy between unity and estrangement could not be starker, and the message of Fordjour's practice could not be louder.

The following text, by William Pym, was written as a guide to the gallery's solo booth for Ryan Mosley at Frieze New York in May 2020. As the fair went virtual and everything became harder to feel, this text was designed as the equivalent of a chat in the booth, standing in front of the work.

A year ago, Ryan Mosley was approached by the Contemporary Art Society, a heritage charity and consultancy that acquires British artworks for public display around the nation, to submit a proposal for the lobby of a skyscraper growing in London. This skyscraper, 22 Bishopsgate, would be second in size, nationwide, to Renzo Piano’s Shard, and would dwarf the landmarks of the city’s colossus-choked financial center. The branding for the building, which would house hundreds of businesses, emphasized an ecology, a healthy flow of healthy people, a ‘vertical village’. Mosley carefully considered the utopian argot of the marketing department, and eventually fixed upon the idea of a quilt as his starting point. Paintings, thought this painter of paintings, would not fit for this space.

The artist had never made anything like this before, a patch textile, nor had he considered making something like this before. These works offer, however, a lesson in Mosley’s method and larger philosophy, and they come from the same place as his paintings. Mosley respects elements, he wishes to understand them on their own terms, and he applies rigorous logic, at every step, as he brings them together to form an image and an object. He is a builder of thought, and he is a builder of artworks. This is our way into the work.

Mosley made eight works for the lobby of 22 Bishopsgate, and they will be revealed in situ this autumn, give or take. The two wall hangings in this presentation represent unfinished business, ideas that the artist wished to pursue after the work for the large commission was completed in February 2020. The two wall hangings in this presentation are the first of their kind to be seen by or sold to the public.

The wall hangings are made in stages. Canvas shapes are cut and painted with powder pigment mixed with an ultraviolet liquid polymer as a binder. Groups of shapes are sewn together on to a backing, and then dyed again as a single piece. Note, here, the left-side harlequin motif on A Natural Plateau, where the tonal range of a vibrant pattern is reduced, a purple skein of dye lying on top of it all, narrowing it down. The left and right edges are wadded for stability, to frame and give definition to the edge, the elements are assembled on the canvas, and a final sealing glaze is applied along with accents of oil paint, painted with a brush. The final mark is the painter’s mark.

Scholarly Voices depicts a man and woman on a small staircase or stepstool. There is a cascade of brightly coloured confetti and a geometric device, perhaps a doorway. Eight cut-silhouette cameos ring around them as an aura, featureless, just pointed left or right. Four of the female silhouettes have topknots in their hair, a little bean, in common with the female protagonist. Perhaps they share some bond. The man and woman on the stairs bleed together, a symptom of their both hitting the same dye bath.

It is hard to unpack the protagonists’ movement on the stairs. Is he protecting her, supporting her, providing chivalry? Are they dancing? Or are they in opposition? Is she trying to get away? The eight floating heads around the piece have the barest of expressions, obscured or obliterated by dye. They can only represent spectatorship, not judgement. Mosley spoke of the manipulation of those eight watching heads. He was tuning an instrument, finding how their collective gaze could affect the action at the centre of the work, and the conclusions we might draw as viewers from their position.

Mosley is a figurative painter, and his figures exist in the space and time, most broadly speaking, of any point in the past 200 years. Animals, clowns, musical instruments, wooden skiffs, formal dress — these elements are neither pinned to a particular moment in society’s development nor pointedly arcane and outdated. Depictions of top hats might call to the second half of the 19th century, and depictions of bowler hats might call to the first half of the 20th century, but there’s no corroboration of these cues, so they’re never fixed in place. To have all these narrative elements demagnetized from culture, Mosley opens up their potential uses to his pictures. He cultivates a precise, fertile ambiguity.

The black-shrouded figure on the left side of Shadows of Belshazzar has a helmet of hair that is neither a bearskin nor a beehive, which means it’s free to function, formally speaking, like, say, a cypress tree in a Van Gogh painting, a vertical interruption breaking up a strong left-right axis, or a tree trying to get closer to god, or an intimation of a flame. When formal elements are not definitively one particular thing, they may be all sorts of other things, and perform beautifully. It’s hard to tell, in fact, if the figure is a man or a woman.

In The Passage there’s a shy marigold sunset, retreating to the corner, cropped by the left edge, just a quarter of a sun when all’s said and done. In a canoe, a couple drifts in the gift of truly open water, one can tell as much because the horizon curves. He’s playing her a song on a guitar. Perhaps the sun wants to leave them alone to their courtship, but there’s no escaping it. That’s not reality, even here. The sun defines them — their wide-brimmed hats echo and amplify its form across the canvas. The sun exposes them — the man’s back twinkles in a weird stained glass of bones, illuminated, and the woman lifts her chin to receive whatever the sun reveals. The threat of the sun’s disappearance is a story told along by the boat’s starboard side and the painting’s bottom-right field, which is licked by an inky blue going black as it gets deeper, and darker. This is what happens when the sun leaves.

There is no moral to the story of the sun setting on the two lovers in the middle of a boundless body of water, just as there is no moral to the Pierrot figure dancing with a skeleton in A King’s Return, or the man with bowed head on a camel in The Coming of Time. There is only the cause and effect of what carefully considered elements bring about. The camel-rider’s tipped top hat points at a locked-in horizontal across the frame, a bit of fierce black punctuation. The camel is not quite looking in the same direction as that hat, which appears to have the most ambition of anything in the picture. So what does that stark black-hat daub connote?

There are ten figures watching the skeleton and clown dance in A King’s Return. Six are definitely paying attention. It’s hard to tell if the performance deserves more or less attention. It definitely feels like we should talk more about the clown’s right foot being a hand, but — again — optically, formally, the painting never goes there. It’s going to remain unsaid. Misdirection is a key to performance, and this is a rowdy painting. The King’s Return could be a séance, dead earnest, or an absurd and meaningless fraternity rite. Stories don’t get told straight in Ryan Mosley paintings.

Mosley has experienced great success and recognition in the past decade. His work has traveled from Sheffield to Leipzig, Baku, Prague, Stockholm, Los Angeles, from the Hermitage to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This past spring, his inclusion in the latest in a long, periodic tradition of statement exhibitions at London’s Whitechapel gallery is a highlight in a highlight-rich young career. The show, Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, was a referendum on the past 20 years of figurative painting, bringing together ten artists who depict people, what they look like and who they might be. The art in this exhibition drew upon religion, race, sexuality and what used to be called identity politics. All types of human were represented, telling their story.

Seen in the context of icons like Daniel Richter’s spectral punks, carrying ultraviolet rage from an earlier generation, or brash, young voices like Tala Madani, in the business of cheeky degradation and disarmament of masculinity, one might wonder how Mosley’s carefully ambiguous scenes might speak their piece. What do they have to say?

Nothing clear, it turns out, and for good reason. Ryan Mosley’s paintings don’t say what people are, they just say what people do, and what the world does around them. Mosley is in the busi- ness of seeing things for what they do, the effects they have, the logic and laws of their exist- ence, and to then highlight their clear qualities and clear intentions. It is peculiar, ultimately, to consider Mosley’s practice an exercise in ambiguity, because his is a direct, pragmatic and honest approach to depicting the facts of humanity. It stands apart.

There’s an alley that reappears in Nicholas Hatfull’s recent paintings. It is an alley from An Autumn Afternoon (1962), Yasujirō Ozu’s final film. David Bordwell, as fierce a film theorist and historian alive, took note of the alley in 1988’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema: ‘The narration plays a trick from the start,’ he explains. As we encounter the alley, the establishing shot shows a row of bar signs, none of which are the bar in question. The second shot opens up the alley, helpfully placing the hero in the scene, but baffles the viewer further by offering even more options of which bar he might be going to.

A third shot hits a bar sign cleanly. Torys Bar. This is where he’s going. As the scene ends, a glance at the ceiling-lamp fixture catches a memory of the confusing abundance of signs and forms in the alley. Through this accumulative sequence of shots, we have got to know a place.

When the protagonist returns to Torys toward the end of the film, as detailed in the final image above, Ozu doesn’t even bother to show the sign. The cue is there. The rhythm is there. The sign doesn’t matter any more.

Nicholas Hatfull is a formalist of the highest order, yet there’s a mystery in his painting. That mystery is the space between what’s logical, how things should work, and how connections and leaps are actually made through brain and eyes. How do we remember, how do we forge memory? What does our brain do in an alley, really?

Kathleen Ryan has been building slices and chunks of watermelon into her celebrated Bad Fruit series since early 2020, where they debuted at Ghebaly in Los Angeles. Built from a library of semi-precious stones, minerals and beads both humble and fancy, the Bad Melon works also feature a silver rind, carved up from a full-size Airstream trailer. Altogether more moist and pulpy than the citrus fruits with which the series debuted at Josh Lilley in October 2018, the Bad Melon works conjure another tangible, tactile aspect of ‘badness’.

The trailer, just a photograph, became real to the artist on a trailer traveling downstate. She sliced up the giant silver lozenge in a New Jersey warehouse. She carved it up and figured out its portions. Bad Melon (Party Girl) is the most recent serving.