Callum Eaton

Callum Eaton makes slick, tantalising portraits of everyday objects that foreground the arrested freedom of late capitalist cities. Known for his sharp photorealism and an emblematic compulsion toward the visual language of overlooked urban infrastructure, Eaton’s work creates vivid, often parodic overtures to an increasingly digitised and transitory post-industrial world. Bringing together a new cycle of paintings composed primarily in London and in part during a six-week residency in Berlin operated by Better Go South, a contemporary art gallery based in Stuttgart, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is Eaton’s first solo exhibition with Duve, Berlin, and includes his most ambitious series of paintings to date.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it features utilitarian city subjects not uncommon to Eaton’s practice: ATM machines, derelict payphones and public elevators, all rendered in luminous high-fidelity oil paint and coloured by contrasting – and at times conflicting – feelings of desire, dereliction and progress. These ‘readymade’ objects, flattened and aestheticized to a series of screens or perceptual portals, are symptomatic of the age we live in today: a frictionless, technology-driven and oversaturated world where realism has been pushed to a simulated extreme. Yet despite their familiarity, where these symbols once represented for Eaton the rapidly-advancing infrastructure of cities as a conveyor belt of progressive, technological obsolescence, here we are presented with their systemic civic and bureaucratic failure.

This shift is felt immediately in the tone of Eaton’s palette. In contrast to trompe-l’œil depictions of colourful self-service photo-booths or payphone doors pasted with McDonalds advertising, such as those shown in 2023 at Carl Kostyal and Hannah Barry Gallery respectively, the imagery in If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it has a melancholic and sombre tone. The near-monochrome steel blue and umber colourways of his vacant modern scenery is cold and alienating; ghostly, photographic even. Like a series of digitally-enhanced grisaille, Eaton’s malfunctioning objects – including out of order urinals, dilapidated lifts and defunct payphones – shutter between images of relics and the image as relic, calling to mind the vernacular of black-and-white archival imagery used in museological catalogues as much as the architectural sculptural negatives of Rachel Whiteread.

For not only does the content of Eaton’s imagery appear ghostly – removed as they are from any specificity of space, place or time – it is the very ideas which sustain those images that are for Eaton also slowly petrifying: democratic urbanism, social mobility, frictionless global travel and digital exchange. The inability of to connect with and through technological devices that have become either disposable or defective creates an acute sense of emotional distance, disaffection and frustration. Eaton’s illusionistic paintings demand to be scrutinised closely, and yet as one does so, the images dissolve not only into abstract gradations of tone, figure and ground collapsing into the flatness of the surface, but mirages of 20th century liberal capitalist ideals.

It is no coincidence there is no human presence in the paintings. The closest we come to a subject is a failed ATM transaction bearing the artists’ own name – a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Renaissance maxim that ‘every painter paints himself’ – that subtly positions the viewer in an animating tension between first-person subject of the scene (the paintings themselves are eerily reminiscent of contemporary POV video game graphics) and voyeur to Eaton’s own abstracted psychological landscape. Indeed, much like the eerie scenes of derelict suburban houses by British painter George Shaw, it is precisely this lack of agency found in Eaton’s paintings that impresses on the viewer that the architectural, technological and material world we inhabit shapes us just as much as we shape it.

One could describe Eaton’s practice as ‘bearing witness’ to the shifting architectures of the city and its technological and material infrastructure. In this exhibition, Eaton pushes this poetics of seeing into a pensive and vexed dimension, softly political and attuned to the anonymity and affective longing many of us feel living in contemporary urban landscapes. Each painting is a confrontation with the inevitable passing of time, with questions of public and civic space, of everyday beauty and legacies of both realist and abstract painting. The use of the titular proverb, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix, stands as an ambiguous and apprehensive statement, both apathetic and satirical, mundane and subversively evocative.

—Charlie Mills

Callum Eaton (b. 1997 Bath, UK) lives and works in London. Eaton graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK (2019). Solo exhibitions include Look but don’t touch, Carl Kostyal, London, UK (2023); and Hole in the Wall, Long Story Short Gallery, Paris, FR (2023). Selected group exhibitions include The Unlimited Dream Company II, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK (2023); I Don’t Need It, But I Want It, The Office, Miami, US (2022); Breaking News, Another Gallery, Paris, FR (2022); The Call, Hackney Down Studios, London, UK (2021); and Morrison Foerster, The Scalpel, London (2021)