02.03 – 26.03.2016
A solo exhibition of recent paintings by Cathy Layzell
The word ‘wilderness’ is linked historically to a continually evolving relationship between man and the environment. Up until the eighteenth century, the term ‘wilderness’ was associated with spaces of despair or fear. Since the nineteenth century it has been reimagined through the cultural idea of the sublime as a rare place where one can glimpse the face of God. What we seek in this concept of wilderness is a place without the anchors of our civilizing culture. A place without the artificial social supports of familiar ego structures.
What do we escape from when we go to nature? Perhaps we escape the biblical wilderness of our own urban lives.
This ironic twist forms the foundation of Layzell’s exhibition where the artist dissolves her image space into pure, formal, abstraction. The works move ironically from the more comforting natural and represenational to the disorientating neons in works that challenge traditional ideas of pictorial landscape.
Layzell’s wilderness is a place of paint and perception, a bold exploration of the limits of the illusionistic image.
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