John Bunker reviews the exhibition Andrea Medjesi–Jones:Ventriloquist at Laurent Delaye Gallery, London, on view through July 27, 2013.

Bunker writes: "Sometimes we ask ourselves what abstract painting is supposed to do ‘now’. What is it for? What has it to offer in the 21st century? Well, Medjesi-Jones offers us a fascinating and strange duality. An extreme excess of contrived painterly incident but somehow emptied of depth and material presence. It takes us to a twilight realm where we are somehow caught in the visual no-man’s land of painterly actions and representations of those actions. This creates what I can only describe as a mute intensity, a sort of silent scream that echoes back through Modernism’s own war torn history."