Paul Day

Description

A crowded café or bar, with an audience of drinkers apparently focussed on the television screen where football is being played: this is fertile ground for Paul Day. His sculptures are invariably about the masses - droves of people going about their pleasures - and this is no exception. However, it is the detail with which Day tells his stories that sets him apart as one with extraordinary vision that matches his highly developed technical skill.

In Sunday Sport the café is seen from above in a fly-on-the-ceiling narrative of incident and repartee. Drinkers are relaxed and ebullient - one man holds forth, while others interrupt. Some take no notice, preferring the action on the screen. A young man seeks a response from his bored girl friend as his tongue searches the recesses of her ear. This is a study of humanity, verging on caricature or parody, but Day deftly avoids making the sculpture into a cartoon. His work is the equivalent of nineteenth century genre, but is firmly based in the culture of today. No aspect of the scene is left to chance, right down to the crease in a trouser leg, a broken fingernail, an untied shoelace, a stray wisp of hair, a voluptuous cleavage, the mesh of a pair of tights, glasses half full and half empty. All are seen and recorded in individual vignettes of drama and incident, yet Day preserves the overall plot. Towards the back of the café stand further figures modelled in relief rather than full three dimensions, a device that emphasises the perspective and Day's use of space within the composition.

The technique of modelling in terracotta that stems from European practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, when portraits and scenes of daily life were worked in the finest detail, has provided Day with an unrivalled resource. He dips into that tradition and takes it further, both in his large-scale terracotta pieces and in the works he chooses to cast in bronze, where further considerations of colour and patina come into play.