Perhaps this reflects the preferences of the selectors (Julian Opie, Lucia Nogueira and Felicity Nunn), but I suspect that they have found a definite trend. The Open always used to have rough edges, with unframed paintings that have come straight from the studio, junk assemblages, untrained or amateur contributions, irreverent caricatures, and so on. This is nothing new in painting – both Harland and Carter owe something to Richard Hamilton. We see dated interiorarchitectural spaces, with stairs and landings for public use. It’s all coolly managed – with such cool, indeed, that one cannot imagine Carter using colour.And something similar is going on in Harland’s painting, whose dark blobs and squiggles seem to represent one of those photos of guns and other weapons spread out on a police table after a raid or an amnesty. So here are two painters respectful of photography, or even awed by the mundane yet omnipresent role of camerawork in our visual world.

She asks for less attention, and thereby gives more to the viewer. Two other paintings deal with the nature of photography, Beth Harland’s Lucid IX and Paul Carter’s Room For Three Carter is into technique. His two-part picture has been made from model paint on a black-and- white photograph on top of a stainless-steel support. This picture is less emphatic than Jones’s usual work, and I think that the change of mood is to be welcomed She has become relaxed. It’s as though Mansfield were dreaming of their abstract nature. Limpid, beautiful and rather odd, this painting has little numbers scratched upon its surface. I don’t know why they should be there, but they add to the atmosphere.
Other paintings in The Tannery include a characteristic abstract by Virginia Verran and a cityscape by Lucy Jones.

The Whitechapel staff, however, have been careful in how they have distributed the strongest work. Tucked away in an unlovely corner of The Tannery is this year’s most memorable painting, an untitled canvas by Andrew Mansfield It’s figurative – sort of. Here are the shapes of vegetables, a carrot and an aubergine, for instance. It’s a flat picture; the paint is thin and liquid; and there’s no attempt to grasp the physical nature of the vegetables. It takes hours to travel around these three sites, and inevitably the feeling is of three different exhibitions, two of them subsidiary to the main event in the parent gallery. THE WHITECHAPEL OPEN has become such a big event that it is nowadays held in other venues as wellas the Whitechapel Art Gallery itself.