Launch Pad: About Painting @ Castlefield Gallery/Agency

Bringing together eight painters from across the UK, Castlefield’s new exhibition Launch Pad: About Painting, explores the variety of abstract painting practice today. Abstraction is certainly in the Northwest air right now: Tate Liverpool has just launched a whole summer season on the subject, and Liverpool Biennial’s co-commission, exploring war-time abstracted 'dazzling', Dazzle Ship by Carlos Cruz-Diez has just been launched in the Albert Dock.

Selected through open submissions judged by a panel including Stephen Snoddy (director of the New Art Gallery, Walsall) and Castlefield’s interim programme manager Matthew Pendergast, there is quite a lot of work on display, with 26 works in total arranged over Castlefield’s two floors. Malevichy works in a muted colour palette derived from Terry Greene. His painted triangles frame the composition, a camera shutter opening up to reveal, or closing to obscure, a secondary layer. Louisa Chambers goes in for optically playful forms that exist within Snake or Pipe Dream game fields. Her Double Decker (2014) is perhaps the most interesting work in the exhibition; a neon peach colon forms an arch around a double-layered yellow and green spiked shape, possibly grass or a pop and pimped seismic graph. Nearby, however, the main shape within Zig-Zag (2014) is too map-like – it looks like the UK with Kent chopped off and Scotland flattened.

Lisa Denyer (who is also the curator of the exhibition) presents mixed media compositions, constructions from plywood, breeze-blocks and found stone that sometimes provide armatures for small paintings but often exist just as themselves. They create makeshift and open-ended micro-narratives; a black and green sparkling rock props up a purple and blue-ish oil painting and rests on breezeblocks in Painted Green Stone (2013) – the painting like an illustration of the murky lagoon where the gem had been found. Another, Painted Bronze Stone (2014) sees the flat side of a black rock painted gold. The rock has an edible cookie quality sitting on its wooden plinth. Elsewhere there are some pleasing spot-lit black-and-white checkered acrylic works from Andy Parkinson, and a couple of billowing wet-brushed paintings from Matthew Macaulay. Macaulay’s works are some of the few to express a looser, freer abandon; they whip up abstraction like sand-storms. [Sacha Waldron]