Charlie Gosling: Good Luck With Me Here

For his second solo exhibition at Incubator, Charlie Gosling returns with a body of work that has been years in the making. Where his 2021 debut introduced a painter closely observing near-strangers, Good Luck with Me Here marks a deepening of that impulse: portraits of friends, partners and loved ones, people who populate Gosling's daily life and whose faces have become inseparable from his understanding of painting itself.

Gosling works predominantly from photographs. His subjects are placed against the studio wall and meet the camera head-on with the frank directness of a passport portrait. Working between a studio in Holborn and a barn in Suffolk, he has moved away from the loaded, accumulated surfaces of his earlier work, indebted to Auerbach and Kossoff, toward a method of application and subtraction. Many of the paintings are made on found wooden boards from the Suffolk barn: paint laid down and scraped back, laid down and scraped back again, producing a thinned, almost spectral surface in which figures almost dissolve into their environments. The scalpel is now as essential a tool as the brush.

Much of this shift can be traced to a single work. During a period of acute self-doubt about what it means to make a painting at all, Gosling withdrew to Suffolk, relinquished his phone and all outside connection for over a month, and found his way back through the act of painting itself. His first self-portrait, made from life during this period, shows the artist tending to a canvas and looking directly out at the viewer from beneath what appears to be bruised, searching eyes, so that you become the subject. He looks at you as you look at him; the edge of his canvas bleeds into the room behind him. It is the painting from which much of the rest of the show emerged.

A group of smaller paintings, cropped tight to the head, gather the faces of Gosling's London world: poets, painters, models and musicians. As Rembrandt painted the civic worthies of his Amsterdam, Gosling paints the figures of his own time and circle with the same unflinching rigour. The likenesses are recognisable, but Gosling pushes each one to the point where a skewed eye or an asymmetrical nose draws you away from the subject and toward the alchemy of material, where the oil, turpentine and pigment conjures a person.

Two larger paintings, Eric and Huddie, are loosely handled and almost impressionistic, their figures lending themselves the quality of having arrived from another century. Since his earlier series of Uber driver paintings, Gosling has possessed an unusual ability to render the contemporary as if already historical, a quality that extends to The Dress, a large painting of Lilian, his former girlfriend, repainted and reconsidered over several years. Lilian also appears in a series of drawings that run alongside the paintings. These are obsessive, repeated studies of the same face, made from photographs but using the open, gestural techniques of life drawing, a practice Gosling has extended beyond the studio to teaching in schools, homeless shelters, and most recently the National Portrait Gallery.