David Wightman: ARIELA – Art Plugged

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David Wightman: ARIELA
Until finally 28th May well 2022
Grove Sq. Galleries
156 New Cavendish Street
London
W1W 6YW

Ariel, a solo exhibition of new works by British contemporary painter David Wightman — the latest artist to sign up for their escalating roster. Comprising a series of paintings, prints, and drawings, Ariel will operate until finally 28th Might 2022. Wightman is renowned for his putting imaginary landscapes, integrating collage, color, and composition to produce worlds which blur the lines involving fiction and reality.

Impressed by the color theory of Josef Albers and the chic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, Wightman’s fantasy vistas defy strict categorisation, evoking factors of both the Passionate and the Abstract. His functions supply a glimpse into a further world — seemingly real nevertheless fully fictional.

Escalating up in the doing work-course suburbs of Bigger Manchester, Wightman took inspiration from his rapid surroundings, reworking the wallpapered walls of his childhood dwelling into the mountains and ravines of his imagined scenes. His get the job done combines formal artistic influences with the fantasy artwork he noticed all over his youth in the 1980s. Wightman moved to London to examine Wonderful Art at Middlesex College and went on to attain a Masters in Portray from the prestigious Royal College of Art, London at the age of 23.

Wightman commences just about every painting with a ‘cartoon’ – the artist’s term for his fragile line-drawing scientific tests – ahead of bit by bit collaging the canvas area with hundreds of hand-minimize items of textured wallpaper to establish his landscape. The moment a composition is thoroughly collaged, in a meticulous and time-consuming process, Wightman paints its surface area, masterfully combining a distinctive color palette with loaded texture to dizzying influence. Wightman’s exceptional collaging strategy is identical to marquetry, but his mechanical precision hides the hand-created craft of his do the job.

Cleanse strains slice across erratic wallpaper textures as the tactile character of the medium is juxtaposed with the work’s peculiar geometry. The when common swirls of living-room wallpaper designs are re-contextualised as the crevices of mountains bumpy spirals grow to be ravines and glaciers established against lakes and skies of impossible lively color.

The titles of Wightman’s imagined peaks are encouraged by his wide interest in mythology, religion, tunes, and literature. Each and every name evokes magnificence and power, a landmark in their fictional globe, speaking to a feeling of both equally familiarity and fiction – whereby the vistas turn out to be partly believable, but also solely unlocatable. Untethered from sights located in our actual globe, Wightman’s landscapes present an imaginary space, free from geographical constraints.

Put entrance and centre, our gaze is drawn in beyond the textured surfaces, deep into and past each layer of the scene that stretches out earlier mentioned and close to us. The chic stillness offers a contemplative high-quality to the works and we are confronted with the mountain as a strong equivalent inside of a dreamlike realm loaded in colour and texture, wherever abstraction and reality contest and converge.