Callum Eaton is an artist from Bath based in London, England. (BA, Goldsmiths, 2019) He has exhibited at Carl Kostyál gallery, has worked under the steady mentorship wing of Oli Epp (PLOP Residency). His studio is based with Cell Studios, London and is currently on an art residency in Berlin during this recording.

"Street-side telephone boxes made all but obsolete by mobile phones and now regularly removed by councils and city planners, remain as reliquaries to unrelenting digital advancement. Coca-Cola vending machines replete with Warholian repetition expose Eaton’s labour-intensive like-for-like replication of on-demand appeasement, while elevators from the artist’s own studio space in the City of London retain eerie echoes of their former life ferrying bankers and business people. Employing that trompe-l’œil trickery popularised by French genre-painter Louis-Léopold Boilly – whose portrayal of overlaid sheets of paper was selected for the Paris Salon of 1800 – Eaton doggedly documents his everyday environment, each painting becoming a new piece of his Sims-esque city-building expansion pack.

And just as the artist is present in Jan van Eyck’s famed Arnolfini Portrait easter-egg or the secret self-portraits that Baroque-period painter Clara Peeters snuck into her still-lives, Eaton himself appears as both an apparition reflected in the door of a launderette’s Washeteria and the example images one might obtain from a Photo-Me self-service photo-booth. The artist as subject – as object perhaps – blurring the lines between the real world he inhabits, and the flattened substrata simulation that exists on the surface of each canvas.”

Special mention and thanks: Brynley Odu Davies, Oli Epp, Carl Kostyál & Cell Studios.