If this is true, the apparent hedonism of modern attitudes is superficial and misleading. Paradoxical as it may seem, our obsession with material goods may have less to do with the satisfaction of our desires than with their evasion. Put more precisely, it may have less to do with the open satisfaction of the desires of which we are conscious (even it at times we are ashamed of their triviality) than with an avoidance of confronting the nature of our deeper, unconscious desires. These desires, being denied, are never wholly satisfied; on the other hand, in that it was only their burial rather than their extirpation which was successful, they continue to press for what satisfaction they can get, given their need to remain subterranean and undetected. There is reason to suppose that the influence which they exercise in this way over political and economic affairs may be as vast as - partly because of its very invisibility - it is potentially dangerous.

Allington's exploration of desire is continued and extended in the works on display in the present exhibition. Unlike in the cornucopias, however, there is no reference to the false expectations and frustrations of consumerism. Nor is he concerned here with the perversion of desire which results from its repression, but rather with the direct and celebrational expression of it.
Both the new sculptures and the new drawings are composed of a repertoire of elements, most of which are readily traceable back to the 'ideal standard forms' or to Rococo ornamentation. The drawings hardly mark any break with their predecessors. As before, objects whose affinity with sculptural form is inescapable hover in a deep illusionistic space reminiscent of de Chirico - one to which both the terms 'theatrical space' and 'dream space' seem appropriate; and which also at times, as in de Chirico's pictures, suggests an attic, with all the associations which  make  that such an appropriate   setting  for  poetic metaphysical speculation. As before, too, part of the ground is made of collaged pages from old ledgers. These serve formally to stress the integrity of the picture-plane and thereby resist what might otherwise be the excess of illusionism; while iconographically it is possible to see them as reminders, in what is essentially Allington's private universe, of an outside world of economic reality - yet one whose significance has been subverted so that it too, perhaps, is an invitation to metaphysical musings.
The present sculptures, by contrast, do represent more of a new direction. Allington's three-dimensional work to date has taken a number of varied forms; and in some cases, including the cornucopias, it has been notably outward-looking and flamboyant. Compared with these, the new pieces may seem more retiring, and in this they come closer to the world of his drawings. But of course they also do that in the more specific sense that they actually contain the same constituent elements as the present drawings (not necessarily only those whose name they share), with the difference that while in the drawings these elements are displayed separately, in the sculptures they arc-meshed together. The resulting compactness of the sculptures brings them, probably more than any of Allington's previous three-dimensional work, into line with conventional expectations of what sculpture should look like. This conformity with convention might seem to be underlined by their being made in bronze; yet here Allington intends a deliberate irony. In the case of two of them, Odalisque and We Are Time, there are much larger wooden versions concurrently on display at the Riverside . Allington refers to the small bronzes at the Lisson as 'fake' versions, alluding both to the fact that bronze is not the original material in which they were modeled and also that, during the process of their creation there was a stage at which the sculptural form only existed negatively, as a void. This idea of negative form can be related to the importance of the part played by the shadows in the drawings.
The love of Rococo ornamentation, and particularly of scrolls and shells, must be seen in the context of Allington's revolt against the tyranny of pure, Classical form. For him the value of Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty lies, at the theoretical level, in its questioning of the notion that beauty is something unchanging and eternal; while at the visual level, he has been directly inspired by two prints which Hogarth included in the Analysis of Beauty, one depicting a sculptor's yard and the other a supposedly elegant but in fact comical dance or ball, each surrounded by a border of odd fragments - anatomical, decorative and otherwise.
Shells also, however, have sexual connotations, as is especially clear in the case of the central shell in the drawing Three Steps Towards the Sea. Hut even the more geometrical elements in the work in this exhibition have, more often than not, a potentially sexual significance. There are shapes which could he read as a penis, a vagina, a clitoris or a breast -or sometimes even an ambiguous hybrid of these. Perhaps it is this sexual reading that makes most sense of the way in which the elements which hover separately in the drawings, come together in the sculptures. The importance of more or less overt sexuality in the work emerged spontaneously, rather than being pre-planned. Allington signaled his acceptance of it in the title Odalisque, where the suggestions of breasts on a reclining figure seemed particularly compelling. It is possible that the title Don't Call Me Pain is a protest against the idea of sex as necessarily sado-masochistic.