The pulsing blast of water cannon, riot police crashing forward in protective gear with strong helmets and shields, the explosive blasts of molotov cocktails, hooded rioters charging forward.  The broken brick walls and worn pine floors of Lazideres Rathbone provide an appropriate rough setting for Jermone Lagarrigues’ paintings and drawings in his exhibition “The Tipping Point”.  This is one exhibition where the gallery style and the art works together; it would be ruined in a more stereotypical white-walled modern art gallery.

Lagarrige was born in Paris in 1973 and now lives in New York. Classically-trained, he brings a contemporary interpretation to the classic French painters like David whose immense paintings fill galleries in the Louvre.

You can feel the raw passion, energy and human emotion in his powerful works which, while derived from press and internet images, focus on the people, the individuals, caught up in these events and are described as a metaphor for our own individual struggles, to right wrongs or to fight for what we believe in against powerful adversarial forces.