Caroline Gorick: After Hours – Reviewed

“As the midday sunshine streams through gallery windows, there is an almost tangible dread.” Mike Pinnington on finding the uncanny in the everyday subjects of Caroline Gorick’s After Hours… 

There’s something about small scale paintings; I think it’s in their ability to attract and hold the gaze. “What is the artist doing here,” I always wonder, wandering over for a better look at the painting in question. “Why have they made what is, after all, this very specific choice?” Whenever I’ve enquired, it’s been the result of circumstance: a case of limited space available (working out of a spare room instead of a studio, for example), or time (a day job, parenthood, perhaps both) – small also often means quick.

Whatever the reason, the results of working with a set of constraints are often compelling. Such is the case with Caroline Gorick’s After Hours, an exhibition of oil paintings ‘exploring,’ says the artist, ‘light, stillness, and the fragile presence of everyday things.’ Depictions of everyday things they might be, but that doesn’t prevent these diminutive paintings from having a richly seductive allure about them.

Their enigmatic, often one-word titles – Veil; Shroud; Yield – add another layer of mystery and appeal. Each contains a mood, suggestive of twilight and beyond, when things – physical and otherwise – get blurry, giddy, uncertain. These, after all, are the hours of possibility, celebration, commiseration, and menace. After Hours, to varying degrees, contains all of these qualities.

Above all, though, it is a sense of the uncanny that prevails. Even as the midday sunshine streams through gallery windows, there is an almost tangible dread in the space. These works, it seems to me, positively thrum with a barely concealed undertone of ambivalent, perhaps malign, meaning.

Hues of red – simultaneously implying passion, excitement, danger and violence – are used to frequent and great effect. Take Root, for instance. Its pink and magenta tentacular forms are the stuff of nightmares. Held and Cast (top) might belong to the same oneiric species. Fizz’s title, meanwhile, suggests a glass of something sparkly, but whether it’s safe to drink, I’m not so sure. Another work, Evening Light, hangs in uncertain, liminal space.

This small but perfectly formed exhibition is well titled. Its works vibrate with the barely perceived listing from familiarity into unease we’ve all felt when the light gets soft, and tone becomes less predictable, indistinct, as time wears on into the wee small hours.

Mike Pinnington

Mike saw After Hours (12–18 June) at Bridewell Studios & Gallery, 18 June

Image: Cast, 2025, by Caroline Gorick