40 x 30 cm | 15 x 11 in
Subject: Animals
Tags:
Horse,
Mythology
Original painting in oil on handmade paper. Unframed.
"This painting was made as a preparatory study in response to a short story by the Russian writer Siqizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), unsung genius of Soviet literature, was a writer of philosophical, satirical, lyrical phantasmagorias. He has been compared to Kafka, Gogol, Borges and Edgar Allen Poe yet remained unpublished until 1989. The painting depicts Quagga, an extinct sub-species of Zebra, and a character in Krzhizhanovsky's story 'In the Pupil', a meditation on the nature of love. In 'In the Pupil' the narrator sees himself -- or rather: "my miniature likeness" -- in his beloved's eye -- and then gets the whole story from the little creature (who turns out to be surprisingly real -- and not the only one stuck in there)."
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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