For his first solo exhibition at Matt’s Gallery and first solo exhibition in London, David Osbaldeston will present a large scale soft-ground etching on paper made specifically for a billboard structure within the gallery space. Using a labour intensive medium within the framework of advertising, he creates an awkward dialogue between the production and distribution of visual culture.

Long since confined in any commercial sense to the dustbin as a form of image making, the hand-made etching presents itself as an outmoded technology. In an ideological battle of inappropriate wills between the hand-made and mechanically produced; like some bastard little brother of punk king Jamie Reid's visual lexicon, or re-articulation of Tristan Tzara's agit prop. A series of highly subjective reflections and observations fill the yawning surface of a billboard to produce a forced marriage of inconveniance. The laboriously hand-produced images form to complete a single massive etching of a photocopy of a drawing of a collage, rendered in black and white as an image of an image. The authority and logic of design is interrupted by digressive voices, as appropriated artworks appear as cameos, interspersed with an obsessive culture of pie charts and accountability - explored as construction, as fiction.

http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/osbaldeston/exhibition-1.php