David Sweet considers the "genre of the painting-relief/construction" in relation to two recent exhibitions Real Painting at at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester and Slow, thick fingers at Kingsgate Workshops.

Sweet concludes: "In terms of the evolution of visual culture, it may be that the hybrid or ‘part painting’ could be a rung above ‘whole painting’ and more suited to progressive contemporary sensibilities. In its ‘pure’ form, painting is seen as an unreconstructed institution in a period that prefers institutions to have been through a crisis of renewal, changing them into something less privileged. The deconstructive aims motivating the work in the two exhibitions seek to reorganise painting’s resources and reduce its historical privileges, in particular its right to exclude itself from ‘things in the world’, in order to produce worlds of its own."