80 x 122 cm | 31 x 48 in
Subject: People
Tags:
Earth Colours,
Community
Original painting in oil on canvas over board.
This painting is from a body of work made in preparation for Ed Saye’s solo show ‘No Promised Land’ at the Foundry Gallery in London in 2016. The following text is taken from the exhibition press release: ‘These images all have a sense, but not more than that, of something that was or could be there.’ Aaron Betsky in his essay Limbo Architecture: Painters of Modernism. Dystopia. Melancholy. Nostalgia. Idealism Super-imposed images, traced outlines, erased/edited details, ghostly figures, and textures that evoke the passing of time are all features of the work in this show. The paintings refer to the legacy of two seemingly contrasting cultural movements from the middle of the twentieth century. On the face of it the hippie and the Modern might seem to be opposing concepts but both shared a similar desire to sweep aside convention and make a new start. Channelling the spirit of hippie modernism these paintings present a heady cocktail of idealism and utopian ambition where flower power meets linear logic. What ties it together is the idea of the struggle for utopia and its inevitable failure.
Ed Saye is an important visionary early career artist - attuned to the collective unconscious with almost prophetic sensitivity, the way we realise retrospectively the best artists always have been.
His work has evolved with rare coherence since graduating in 2009. Now we stand in the world he’s been describing to us. Figures moving through liminal light - half asleep or wide awake - new dawn or an apocalypse? Players caught between scripts. Some running the old rituals, unaware of how profoundly the ground has shifted. Others quietly sitting alone with the trees. The colour hums between reverence and recoding, hyperreal, radiant - the saturation turned just past natural, where pigment behaves as energy. This momentous threshold, held in liminal light.
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