Sam Cornish considers the work of Dominic Beattie.

Cornish writes: "The most pleasing quality of Beattie’s art is its physicality, when he achieves a solid, tactile image, with figure and ground fused together. Generally he will build up layers before cutting through them and rearranging these parts, quickly arriving at combinations be could not have foreseen, and cannibalising nearly completed works into each other. In the best of them the decisiveness with which he cuts his material (on occasion he has used garden shears to chomp through layers of hardboard) meets an equal decisive fusing of his parts into a single unit… it is a little misguided to demand that collage should aim at wholeness, a restorative resolution, when disjunction is so central to our encounter with it; whilst the current fashion for failure or formlessness without a supporting or opposing pictorial architecture is academic, in that it results in things that are to be drily polemicised about rather than looked at. What is needed is vividness, a drama or a standing to attention reached with enough agility to allow work to continue, a structure that strikes whilst avoiding a potentially lifeless completeness. Beattie, it seems to me, is making positive moves in that direction."