Each work is intricate and festive and, at their best, is not overwhelmed by the proliferation of visual highlights. In his own words, David Akenson's work is 'roundabout'. Each meticulously crafted object floats around certain broad modernist propositions and various quotidian references without any direct outcome offered to the viewer. Their quizzical forms and candy-like colouring hint at some playful obsession, but form and colour often seem disjunctive in these works. But while this description might be apt it may also be too convenient.
Contemporary practice finds itself in an ambivalent position.
It is, at once, wholly aligned, even indebted, to the trajectory of twentieth-century art and riven from its greatest ambitions. Looking at the late Sixties, the final erosion of a strong formalist argument about the course of contemporary art opened the way for trajectories of practice which did not then fit the bill, but have now become familiar. Lacking the singular coherence of the formalist explanation of modernism, artistic practice today can appear wholly unfathomable or, at least more telling in a contradictory way, it is not given to such a handy summary. By the end of the Sixties, modernist avant-gardism appeared to be collapsing in a frenzy of new and quickly rotating 'isms'. The rhetoric of avant-garde innovation had looked exhausted and appeared commonplace, verging on the trite.