Expansive landscapes rendered faintly over raw linen are analysed and contemplated by a language of geometric forms that cast a reticle over the painted space, optimistically charting its return to a paradise lost.
Alex Virji's quietly romantic paintings currently on show at Man & Eve describe imagined or remembered landscapes in sketchy, fleeting marks. With graphite and set square the artist-cartographer traces delicate contours over these shadowy places (mountainous, fluvial, forested) – fractioning the frame like viewfinder grids; drawing provisional maps, or scores, for future (fictional?) journeys. The canvases call to mind Peter Greenaway's early works on paper (at once meticulously cartographic and beautifully painterly); the dreamy, improbable vision of René Daumal's Mount Analogue; and of course Ballard's Crystal World...
What is called into question is the nature of the viewer and their intentions on the landscape, as the lines transecting the picture plane measure and attempt to quantify it ... It may be that this tense, but active relationship between found structure and imposed form is simply a reflection of the retinal battle between an individual observer and the world they try to navigate and locate themselves within. Essay by Fin Cullum
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Yesterday marked the halfway point of my time with Reside. Three months have passed incredibly quickly and my baby is now due in just over a fortnight. Before then I'm hoping to have tried projecting my 8mm footage through these tetrahedron maquettes – roughly constructed for now in mirror card and acetate – and to have commissioned some real, hinged pyramids in glass...
Yesterday marked the halfway point of my time with Reside. Three months have passed incredibly quickly and my baby is now due in just over a fortnight. Before then I'm hoping to have tried projecting my 8mm footage through these tetrahedron maquettes – roughly constructed for now in mirror card and acetate – and to have commissioned some real, hinged pyramids in glass...
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Meanwhile... group show Discernible continues at Zeitgeist Arts Projects until 11 May. Here are some installation shots:
Meanwhile... group show Discernible continues at Zeitgeist Arts Projects until 11 May. Here are some installation shots: