Boyd Webb makes still lifes from balloons and nails and Anaglypta wallpaper. This is a world in which ordinary objects are made flesh - nasty, shrivelled, disconcerting flesh
In another life, Boyd Webb might have done well in advertising. The inventor of bizarre photographic tableaux, the deviser and recorder of enigmatic mises-en- scene harbouring emblematic intent, could so easily have been the Bartle Bogle Hegarty visualiser. As it is, Webb remains the unacknowledged influence behind untold numbers of ads. His artful, cunning and punning photographic tableaux were the models for Silk Cut and Benson & Hedges campaigns mounted the world over. The pay might be worse, in his field, but at least he can content himself with the knowledge that he is his own master.
But what, exactly, is Boyd Webb's field? It gets harder to define as the years pass: not quite installation art, not quite sculpture, not quite collage or assemblage, not quite photography, but a slippery combination of genres. ''Boyd Webb'' at Brighton City Art Gallery, a touring exhibition of new work, sees him not branching out, exactly, but branching in. He is, still, lost in his own world, a world of laborious studio arrangements and disconcerting set-ups involving all kinds of strange objects, or ordinary objects made strange - balloons stuffed with nails, lengths of carpeting twisted to form seas, an old duvet folded and photographed to resemble, disconcertingly, flesh - but it has shrunk and contracted.
His oddities have always been meaningful, his eccentricities pointed, and Webb's world was always meant to be a Surreal version of the real world, a bizarre yet germane paradigm of The Way Things Are. But its meanings have changed and it is a smaller place than it once was, more microcosm than macrocosm: a place ruled by...
