Current Exhibition

21/04/08 - 16/05/08

“a man wakes up sweating inside an uneasy hybrid fiction”

An exhibition of recent painted drawings by Samuel St.Leger.
St.Leger’s obsession with landscape is exercised through a unprecedented approach to his materials. The artist is bound at once to the British romantic landscape tradition and recent approaches to the process of making a painting. Alongside the carefully-masked acrylic ‘scalpel-drawings’ for which he is now well known, St.Leger presents the ‘Sentinel’ series of watercolours – produced in tandem with his acrylic paintings. These works have allowed the artist a more fluid approach to his thematic concerns. Also debuting in the show will be the purely tonal series ‘Half Light’.

The ‘Half-Light’ owe much of their genesis to surrogates found in Berlin museums. In Berlin grey photocopies were placed as stand-ins for works of art temporarily removed for restoration. These copies, with their intimate scale, stark lack of detail and with scant tonal-variation, appearing as small black squares on the gallery wall at a distance, had to stand for the whole weight of history of the over-sized old-master works they represented. They were wholly unsuited to the task in every way.