Art Critics
John Berger 1995."Figures Lost in the Wasteland.This is one of Andrew Gadd's paintings.We are not far from Goya,yet we are living today."
Brian Sewell.1998.
"He is potentially a very considerable painter,one who is capable of keeping alive the traditions of European art,the outstanding picture in the 1995 exhibition was of a young man lying on floorboards and the most accomplished work in this is the portait of Gbenga Ilamoka first seen in this year in the National Portrait Gallery."
Edward Lucie Smith.1998.
"Gadd's work shows a wide stylistic range.The way in which he tackles single-figure compositions,for example,is both broader in handling and more apparently "realistic" in approach than his way of painting works with a large number of figures and an evident narrative content.In no case,however,are we tempted to mistake the simulacrum for reality, we are always aware that we are looking at a surface which had been structured and given life by the action of the brush.We are kept constantly aware of the identity of paint as a substance in it's own right.By treating his medium in this fashion Gadd is following a tradition which decends to us from the Barque period and which incorporates some of Europeans greatest masters,among them not only Valasquez and Goya,but Hals,Rembrandt and Manet.To cite these names is of course to lay a heavy burden on a painter who is still young and who is struggling with a cultural climate which remains,to some degree at least,unsympathetic to what he does.But it does at least indicate the kind of path he is attempting to travel."
Brian Sewell 2006"
I have watched Gadd since his days as a student at the Royal Academy in the early 1990s.He then seemed greatly gifted in an old-fashioned,English way,a belated heir to Sickert,Nicholson and ,bloody minded enough to make headway against the tide of the Serota Tendency."
"The Labelmakers,a frozen moment in an Indian sweatshop,is an old-fashioned masterpiece of clarity and staging,and in the Unfortunate Incident it is with exquisite judgement that he extends the tension of the thinly lined composition over a canvas 15 feet long"
John Berger...2010.The Day Begins exhibition
"Something like a prophesy of vision and talent being fulfilled.The paintings both awaken and haunt.Bus Stop Nativity,The Day Begins and God and his Dog are indelible.Because of the indivisible " fit" between your methods methods as a painter and your vision as a seer."
