David Wightman: ARIELA – Art Plugged

David Wightman: ARIELA
Until 28th May well 2022
Grove Square Galleries
156 New Cavendish Road
London
W1W 6YW

Ariel, a solo exhibition of new works by British up to date painter David Wightman — the latest artist to join their increasing roster. Comprising a sequence of paintings, prints, and drawings, Ariel will operate till 28th Could 2022. Wightman is renowned for his striking imaginary landscapes, integrating collage, colour, and composition to create worlds which blur the strains among fiction and fact.

Influenced by the colour idea of Josef Albers and the sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, Wightman’s fantasy vistas defy demanding categorisation, evoking factors of both of those the Passionate and the Summary. His operates offer you a glimpse into another environment — seemingly actual nonetheless entirely fictional.

Increasing up in the operating-class suburbs of Higher Manchester, Wightman took inspiration from his quick surroundings, reworking the wallpapered walls of his childhood residence into the mountains and ravines of his imagined scenes. His perform combines formal creative influences with the fantasy art he observed throughout his youth in the 1980s. Wightman moved to London to review Great Art at Middlesex University and went on to achieve a Masters in Painting from the prestigious Royal School of Artwork, London at the age of 23.

Wightman commences just about every portray with a ‘cartoon’ – the artist’s phrase for his delicate line-drawing research – ahead of slowly collaging the canvas surface area with hundreds of hand-minimize parts of textured wallpaper to create his landscape. At the time a composition is completely collaged, in a meticulous and time-consuming method, Wightman paints its surface area, masterfully combining a unique colour palette with abundant texture to dizzying effect. Wightman’s exclusive collaging strategy is similar to marquetry, however his mechanical precision hides the hand-produced craft of his operate.

Thoroughly clean traces slice throughout erratic wallpaper textures as the tactile character of the medium is juxtaposed with the work’s peculiar geometry. The when familiar swirls of living-room wallpaper designs are re-contextualised as the crevices of mountains bumpy spirals turn out to be ravines and glaciers established in opposition to lakes and skies of difficult vivid color.

The titles of Wightman’s imagined peaks are encouraged by his broad interest in mythology, religion, audio, and literature. Each identify evokes natural beauty and power, a landmark in their fictional world, speaking to a perception of both of those familiarity and fiction – whereby the vistas become partly plausible, but also fully unlocatable. Untethered from views uncovered in our actual entire world, Wightman’s landscapes existing an imaginary place, cost-free from geographical constraints.

Put entrance and centre, our gaze is drawn in over and above the textured surfaces, deep into and earlier each layer of the scene that stretches out above and about us. The chic stillness offers a contemplative high-quality to the performs and we are faced with the mountain as a potent equal within a dreamlike realm loaded in colour and texture, exactly where abstraction and truth contest and converge.

©2022 David Wightman