Frost treats painting as a serious game where sense catalyses within hermetic systems; we’re anchored, amid his diverse, bright and offhand-looking canvases, by motifs relating to leisure, artistic production, particular styles, lifestyles and emotions. The imagery that is used is essentially a symbol, a stand-in for something else or ‘the real thing’, where encrypted meanings play out behind the camouflage. A type of branding and codification locates the work within the historical genre of painting and allied with an apparent speed of making we see Frost pitching contemporary methods of image making alongside a historically layered medium. This combinatory language seals itself off from the world with one hand while the other knowingly and contradictorily invites the everyday in with the corrupting presence of paraphernalia such as homemade bars or food and drink leftover from openings placed in the gallery leaving one consistently unbalanced, questioning and entertained.

The show’s title takes its cue from the common cell phone setting that temporarily suspends the device’s signal transmitting functions while still permitting the use of other functions. In this exhibition Frost will exhibit paintings alongside office watercoolers filled with assorted cocktails bringing the institutional role of the ‘workplace’ into conversation with methods of artistic industry, communication and presentation.

Alistair Frost was born in England in 1981 and lives and works in London.