JAMES HANLEY's aggressive, full-frontal style is epitomised by the diptych which faces you as you enter his exhibition; called Full Frontal, it shows a young man legless from the knees and wearing a cycling helmet, astride a chair, while in the flanking picture a man in evening dress crouches on another chair, holding a gun.
It is not the subtlest of approaches, but it establishes an edgy, topical, potentially violent mood which holds good for the exhibition as a whole.
Hanley likes to use clashing, even contradictory, imagery, creating a feeling of dislocation and alienation.
He picks these images mainly from popular urban culture, the world of the cinema poster and the record sleeve, television serials of the more violent kind, perhaps even pulp and science fiction.
The treatment is usually rigidly frontal and centralised, so that the figures appear locked into their own inner and outer tensions.
Rather surprisingly, the exhibition has a preponderance of black-and-white works, which contrast with the hard, high-toned and almost gaudy colours of the big paintings.
Again, these black-and-white pictures stress the theme of the full-length male body., and They have a macabre, often violent ambience (though, curiously enough, this is expressed through a style of drawing which is "correct" and traditional to the point of being academic).
Perhaps Hanley forces the pace a little too much, producing some rather strained or contrived effects - his imagination occasionally seems to hover in an area between surrealism and the horror comic. But he is a young artist with a strong following, as well as a strong and immediately recognisable style.
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