42 x 30 cm | 16 x 11 in
Subject: People
Tags:
Silhouette,
Community,
Line,
Figure
Original drawing in ink on heavyweight paper.
"This drawing 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. 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’s paintings hold the strange beauty of a world still running its rituals after the meaning has shifted. Figures walk, gather, hold small suns in their hands, unaware of how altered the air has become. The colour hums at a frequency between reverence and re-coding - radiant, hyperreal, irresistible - the saturation dial turned just past natural, where colour starts to behave as energy instead of pigment. His work has evolved with rare coherence, each canvas reorganising itself from within, as though the paint were recalibrating to each new atmosphere - the pigment edging toward another register entirely.
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