Simon Birch - laughing with a mouth full of blood

 A presiding theme in these works is theinterweaving of pain and pleasure, dark and light, antipathy and empathy. His subjects twist and turn in pain or ecstasy, fall or fly, break free of gravitational pull or get sucked back earthwards to their end. Drawing on his own experience of illness – in 2007 Birch was diagnosed and treated for a rareform of cancer – works such as ‘Cordite’ explore what the critic Susan Sontagcalled our “dual-citizenship” in the realms of the well and of the sick. The textured surfaces, where paint has been applied thickly with brush and palette knife, accentuate the struggle, giving a tactile sensibility to the paintings and suggesting an integral relationship between the artist’s facture and theexertions of the human figure on the canvas.