Take your pick | 9 April 2008

Robert Dukes (born 1965) is one of our finest younger artists. Now enjoying his second solo show with Browse & Darby (19 Cork Street, W1, until 2 May), this painter in the great tradition of European realist art proves that he can deliver the goods while continuing to break new ground. The chief joy of his exhibition is the lucid and succinct colour. Just look at the run of still-life paintings down the right-hand wall of the gallery as you enter. In front of you is the delicious ‘Pink Rose’, sensual and particular, and then comes a whole cornucopia of individually painted fruit. Here are paintings of startling originality and succulent paintwork: ‘Small Green Lemon’, ‘Red Grapefruit’, ‘Two Satsumas’, ‘Cadmium Lemon’, ‘Orange on a Shaving Mirror’ and ‘Lime Study’. But Dukes doesn’t only paint fruit. Among the other subjects on show are portraits, a pair of scissors and a langoustine. These paintings look wonderfully fresh, with a sense of the inevitable to balance their spontaneity. So it’s important to be reminded just how difficult they are to make, as Dukes informed us in his wry ‘Diary of a Painter’ in last month’s Galleries magazine.

It’s so good to find an artist who knows and loves the great tradition of painting, and who doesn’t think — like so many conceptual artists — that they’ve just invented the wheel. Dukes’s fruitful dialogue with the Old Masters is evident here in the marvellous painting ‘A Church in Naples, after Thomas Jones’, and in such delights as his painted studies after Rembrandt. There’s also a whole tranche of modestly priced drawings (after Morandi, Goya, Veronese, Degas et al.), mostly hanging in the downstairs gallery. This is a lovely show, and particularly impressive in the way Dukes makes his subjects glow with inner life.