20 x 26 cm | 7 x 10 in
Subject: Landscapes & Nature
Original painting in oil on board.
Charlie Yates' first solo show received a glowing review from Giles Sutherland in The Times, headed “a clarity of vision flows through his art.” Sutherland wrote: “Ambition is good and talent is better. Yates has plenty of both.”
We all know memories fade, but what does the breakdown process look like? In Charlie Yates’s work, all stands still just long enough for us to peer at the semblance of time amid its washing away. In muted and blurring colour, old photographs sourced from the 50s to 70s are recreated in new ways, often redolent of sun-bleached holidays, busy communal establishments, and an air of wistful delight. In “Café del Mar” (2019), an interior coagulates almost like bleach spots on dark fabric, with pale blues and yellows glowing amidst waves of brown that hold the painting together. Faceless figures become part of the infrastructure itself, peeping out as both anonymous but integral to the formative scene at hand. Elsewhere navy intersects with red in the dramatic “George Street” (2020), nodding to historic urban painting and the chronicling of a city’s history.
At times this body of work really speaks summer to us: capturing the sun’s incredible effects on colour, of bleaching and making vivid. These prismatic scenes are imbued with a muted sense of wonder. As the review notes, sometimes Yates works from photographs. His paintings have that quality of looking at the past: the opacity of memory. The toning and shading give the effect of a partially screened lens, funnelling our vision through time.
These paintings are ambiguously of a place and time – but this is precisely what the painter uses to make these works believably of a place and time. He harnesses, with aplomb, the beguiling mood of nostalgia: the longing for places half-real, half-imagined.