Paint, weather, weight: a show in Bermondsey

The Roundwell Foundation occupies a converted bonded warehouse on the western side of Bermondsey Street, set back from the road behind a small forecourt of York stone. On the third Saturday of February, the opening of the spring painting show drew a quiet crowd of about ninety, most of whom were looking, not talking. The works on view are by three painters — Marina Beech, Roy Sallows and Edith Hong — and the exhibition runs through April.

The Foundation has, over the past few years, become one of the more reliable places in London to see painting that hasn’t been thinned out by an art-fair logic. Its rooms are not flashy. The light comes from clerestory windows along the south side and is supplemented, very minimally, by tungsten downlights set high. On the day I went, the daylight was doing nearly all of the work.

Marina Beech: weather as a kind of subject

Beech’s four paintings, all from the past eighteen months and all unframed, are hung along the longest wall of the first room. They are landscapes in only the loosest sense — there is no horizon line in any of them, and the paint is laid down in long, patient pulls that catch and release the canvas in places where she has scraped back to the gesso.

The largest, Field, late September, is roughly two metres across and reads at first as monochrome: a kind of bruised greenish-grey that seems to recede when you walk towards it. Stand at three feet and it is not monochrome at all. There is an ochre laid down underneath, and the green has been worked over it wet-into-wet, and in the lower-left corner — almost the last place you’d look — there is a single mark of cadmium red the size of a postage stamp.

I asked the invigilator how long Beech had spent on this one. He didn’t know, but said she had asked for it to be hung last, after the others were already on the wall, and had stood with it for about half an hour before agreeing it could open.

Roy Sallows: small things

Sallows’s six small paintings — none larger than a paperback — are hung in a single row in the middle room, at standing eye-height, with twelve inches of wall between each. They are oils on prepared boards. The subjects, if you can call them subjects, are interiors: a corner of a room, a chair half-seen, a doorway giving on to another doorway.

The discipline of them is the thing I keep returning to. Sallows works in a palette of about five colours and uses no white directly out of the tube. The whites are mixed off the brush. This is a thing he has spoken about elsewhere, and you can see it in the paintings: the highlights are warm, faintly yellow, faintly pink, never the optical white that signals picture.

I stood with the third painting, Front room, afternoon, for longer than I had meant to. It depicts a chair, an armchair, with light falling across the back from a window outside the frame. The chair is empty. There is no narrative — Sallows is not interested in narrative — but the empty chair carries the day around with it.

Edith Hong: the wall

Hong’s contribution is a single work: a painting nine feet by twelve, occupying the entire end wall of the third room. It is, at first glance, blue. It is, on longer looking, a series of blues — a deep Prussian beneath, a cobalt mid-tone, a thin scumble of paler blue on top that breaks open in places to reveal what is beneath. The brushwork is broad and unhurried.

A painting like this one is doing different things at different distances. From the doorway it is a wall of colour, almost a Rothko move. From twelve feet it is a weather system. From three feet it is a record of decisions, the strokes overlaying each other and not pretending to be the surface they describe. The exhibition card calls it Untitled (March) and gives the date as 2025.

The Foundation has not priced any of the work — they are showing only, with sales handled by the artists’ galleries — and I think this contributes to the calm of the rooms. There is no commercial machinery on the walls. You are left, more or less, to look.