PUBLIC Gallery is proud to present Unblock Me You Coward, a solo exhibition of London based artist Lung. The exhibition features a new series of paintings and a 30- meter-long sky dancer in which Lung engages with what he has come to call the ‘semi- ecstatic’, a brazenly homemade method of filling up the subconscious and then letting it spill out.

The exhibition is a continuation of Lung’s ecstatic purge process, which works to produce uncalculated quickly made marks that exist in a world where everything is touched by the same discordant horror hand. For Lung thinking whilst making the marks is a failure, if he can see a logic in them afterwards the effect is nullified. The works have to constantly surprise to be effective and have no knowing mark making, therefore must not be contrived or planned.

I guess it’s like some nut job getting high and swishing paint around, but the process of getting to the semi ecstatic can be hard work, it involves not just filtering inspiration but programming myself with the right mode. Filling up with the right petrol but also sometimes it’s good to ruin the tank, like it can be a looped pop chorus or a scene from a film combined like a mantra playing in the subconscious. Through that comes something new, not always good, but if it feels like it came from a non precious subconscious then I don’t paint over it.

The abstract comic sensibility seen in Lung’s work is mixed up in an ethereal world which fuses token signals with demented renderings, all of which are gathered from the world around us, pushed through the semi-ecstatic funnel, and finally plop onto the work in varying degrees of un-glory.

If I have to sum it up at the time of writing, I’m channelling that feeling when you hear the same bit of library music advertising both blood pressure pills and dog biscuits or when you see a continuity error in a film, the actor gets out of the pool then they’re hair is dry in the next scene a second later. This is as anti-edit, this is cutting to a 5 min shot of him drying off even though you’ll lose the audience

Lung is an artist living and working in London. He received his MA from Central St Martins and has since been exhibited internationally in the UK, US, Mexico and Japan where he has a particularly strong following. Over the last five years his practice has primarily turned towards painting and sculpture; however, his art still utilizes a wide range of different mediums also including video, animation, installation and music.