VIENNA.- Galerie Hubert Winter is presenting the 4th solo exhibition of Stephen Skidmore (b. 1950 in Newcastle, lives and works in London) at the gallery. On view for the first time are the Afternoon Paintings, a series created between 1999 and 2004.

In the opening minutes of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train, the protagonists are shown as two separate pairs of legs, striding purposefully across streets and platforms. The story only really begins once they stop being strangers and collide, via an accidental bump of crossed feet. Picture, though, a deferral of that decisive moment – a suspension, that is, of the bodily touch that gets things going – and you’re close to the peculiarly charged atmosphere of Stephen Skidmore’s Afternoon Paintings.

Even the origin of these paintings has something of the Hitchcockian thriller about it. One afternoon, about twenty-five years ago, Skidmore sat down on a bench on a busy platform in London’s Waterloo Station, his Pentax camera in his lap.

And, without really looking at what he was doing, he started taking photographs, six in total. (Soon afterwards, he was spotted by station staff, taken to a room for a tense interview, and told not to do it again. Different times). While this event feels pre-empted in the history of photography – one thinks of Walker Evans in the late thirties, his camera stuffed inside his coat, snapping surreptitious pictures of fellow travellers in the New York City subway – Skidmore’s translation of photography into paint alters its inference. The speed and casualness of the origin is transformed, through the slow work of painting, into a way of thinking about the mysteriousness of the visible world and the strangeness of strangers.

How does this take place, though? In Skidmore’s own self-effacing words, the Afternoon Paintings tell “the story of what happened during one hour”, one ordinary day in Waterloo Station. But what is happening in these paintings? Nothing much. Notable happenings in train stations are things like cancellations or disasters: anything that halts the smooth flow of movement stations are designed to facilitate. Here, though, Skidmore shows bodies condensed into legs and feet, the basic apparatus of movement, in a way that denies a viewer the closure a bump or a bang might bring. What we are granted instead is the luxury of a paused moment. The attention Skidmore brought to his printed photographs, re-describing them in tender, cautious marks of the brush, encourages a slow encounter with these works. Though literally disembodied in their content, Skidmore’s paintings are nonetheless sensual and tactile in their surfaces, as though eyes had hands.

The Afternoon Paintings provide visual pleasure through restricted viewpoints. With so little to see, we’re given so much to look at: the swing of a trouser leg; the different weights of bags held in each hand; light bouncing off a bottle; the shine of a high heeled shoe; the unplanned synchronicity of two people walking beside each other. These works are poetic in the sense of W.H. Auden’s ambiguous phrase “Poetry makes nothing happen”. Skidmore’s paintings take a nothing – an ordinary event barely noticed, an unremembered movement through public space – and make it happen in paint. They hold life still not to solve it but to keep its strangeness intact.

Text by Ben Street