BRIGHT Star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

John Keats, Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art, (c. 1818-21).

PROLOGUE: KEATS’ BRIGHT STAR

The great John Keats, whose haunting lyric and melodic phrase made for the most vivid, picturesque poetry, singing with equal gusto of the largess of love and the wistful longing for it, is celebrated by many as the ‘poster child’ for the group of English poets, active in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries known as ‘The Romantic Poets’. A brilliant company that included luminaries such as Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, Keats is often elevated above the seemingly stratospheric literary achievements of his fellow Romantics because of his youthful, dazzling ingenuity and, alas, his untimely demise.

Keats was only 25 years old when he died, in Rome, of tuberculosis. His body remains there, buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery; his grave adorned with a headstone that ends with the typically Keatsian text, so sensual, so pregnant with possibility: Here lies One / Whose Name was Writ in Water. Keats, born in London on Halloween in 1795, struggled with his health throughout his short life. Hoping to live in a warmer climate, Keats decided to sail for Rome in September 1820, arriving in the city two months later. He lived in a villa on the Spanish Steps which is now the Keats-Shelley Memorial House Museum. Sadly, Keats’ worsening condition coupled with the toll of the journey from London to Rome, meant that he lived in the city for less than six months, passing away on 23 February 1821.

On this journey Keats continued to finesse (and perhaps even complete) what was his final poem: Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art. Addressed to a star (likely the North Star, used by sailors to navigate their ships for centuries, but around which also the night sky [and thus the universe] appears to spin), Keats’ sonnet is about eternity. The eternal love he holds for his beloved; the consistency of a star’s unwavering resolution; its patient yet endless observation of the poet and both his desires and travails. Keats’ lyrical meter transforms the star from mere physical beacon into something far more psychologically prescient; an amplification that offers a melancholic texture to this ode, so that the star comes not just to symbolise timelessness but finds an alliance with transience itself, colouring in the capriciousness and brevity of both life and death. For Keats, eternity, fuelled by the bittersweetness of love, traverses the oceans and mountains of time, be they ere, now, and beyond. This poem echoes with supple, dreamy symbolism, made even more whimsical because of its rhythm and the fact it is a nocturne, of sorts; the ambiguity of the night sky feeding the effulgence of Keats’ imagery (and his star protagonist) even as it shrouds the text with a delectable, fragile mystery. The majesty of nature, the passage of time, the never-ending desire for a connection both physical and abstruse, and the fluidity yet flummox of their perennial entanglement all thread their way through Keats’ beautiful, timeless poem.

These strands of thought and poetic enterprise neatly offer a multi-faceted lens through which to explore the work of sixteen artists, shown together at Mattia de Luca Gallery in Rome in an exhibition called Bright Star. The majority of these artists focus on the discipline of painting, and nearly all live and work in London. Like Keats and his poem, these works have travelled from London to Rome where they collectively explore patterns of presence, love, longing, and Nature, often with a nod to the past and amplified through strategies of condensation and fluctuation. All of which speak not only to Keats’ prayer to Polaris for ever-lasting life and love (even though he knows such prayers can never be answered), but also to the times in which we live today.

CHAPTER I: IDYLLS AND IDOLS

The discovery of now is often found by digging deep into the past. Like the archaeologist, the painter can help the viewer better understand the vagaries of today by taking us back to ancient times: a visual act of wrest and tribute to arrest that is achieved not through any telescope of observation but is rather guided by that bright star of (re)invention, illuminating the delicate unriddling of fiction into fact just as fact folds itself into the fabric of fiction. Such is the dynamic informing the work of Sholto Blissett. Eclipse (2024) proposes a halcyon landscape, humming with the ancient chords of myth and bathed in the light of romantic lore. A gazebo, decorative as folly, emits the spiritual grandeur of a temple as the light of daybreak (bright from our closest star) spills through it, its form throwing shadows across Blissett’s imagined space. Nature is here as inextricably linked to the poesy of fiction as it is to the matter of fact, the result being a scene or ‘scape, as sublime as it is uncanny, that questions the veracity not only of that which is presented before us, but the very intent that fuels such a presentation. Blissett asks us to contemplate not just the ethereal space he conjures, but why he does so in the first place, fusing both the past with the present; the natural with the artificial and inviting us not to untangle the two but to maintain their synthesis as a means of our escape from the vicissitudes of now.

Were we to walk inside Blissett’s tiny rotunda we could very well find the protagonists occupying Ella Walker’s The Room (2024). The frisson between ancient and contemporary continues in Walker’s composition where three women, connected yet strangely dislocated, assume unusual poses both comedic yet somewhat rueful, evincing shapes and miens one finds in medieval manuscripts or contemporary theatre. The central figure, arms aloft in both celebration and surrender and curiously dressed in garb as erotic as it is confrontational, as then as it is now, contrasts with a more ‘traditional’ depiction of a figure in the lower right, whose garb speaks to Renaissance paradigms even as her dress - provocative and pellucid - appears to bleed down her. On the right a top-hatted woman is shown standing in a mysterious box, adding another modern, surrealist layer to this already uncanny tableau. Walker’s room flits between epochs gone and yet to arrive, voiced by the classical architecture in the background forced back by the simple geometry and perspective of tiles that are timeless in their palette and display. Even the manner of this painting’s execution speaks to a past long gone but clearly not forgotten as Walker’s luminous space is captured on stretched paper in the very old and traditional medium and technique of tempera, lending the composition a planar and pigmented flatness that articulates itself as both ancient and modern in the very same whisper.

In Jewish and Mesopotamian mythology Lilith is regarded as the first wife of Adam, banished from Eden for not obeying her husband. These ancient narratives nurtured the indexical development of Lilith into the primordial ‘she-demon’ figure she cuts today: a paragon of feminine sin and immorality that finds its voice in the contemporary annals of the occult. Ryan Driscoll’s Lilith (2024) finds our (anti)-heroine standing naked in the rocky wilderness of a Giorgione or Bellini painting, holding what appears to be a small snake, and surrounded by an emerald, frottaged umbra – a direct nod to Max Ernst, perhaps - that embraces Driscoll’s figure like a shadowy curse. Tension sizzles in the lapis-lazuli sky with Lilith appearing anything but the antagonist: her downcast head, slightly askew pose and the curious appearance of a chain in the lower left imbuing the figure with an inescapable sense of apprehension and confiscation. It is this wobble between, and conflation of, the yonic, emblematic power of Lilith as Feminine, but now adumbrated in column-like verticals of phallic thrust, as issued by the standing figure and the craggy mountains that surround her, that lends this Lilith a certain ambiguity that subsequently nourishes the painting’s Queerness. For all the figure’s physiological accuracy, a fluidity – if not delta – of gendered assumptions eddy around the different vernaculars and taxonomies of presence and their non-binary, androgynous, Queer forms. Such questioning is not unique to contemporary art and culture; indeed, Driscoll utilises a deliberately antique visual language – whiffs of Bronzino or Pontormo perfume the air – to afford him the opportunity of both embracing and manipulating the power and freedom that such mythology extends to him as he explores his Lilith not in flux, nor in transition, but on a journey that challenges our preconceived boundaries of identity.

Louise Giovanelli also transports her viewer back to the aureate light and simple delineation of Trecento or Quattrocento Italy, yet the images she arrives at are the result of a fascinating discourse and contest, both conceptual and technical, between the early art of Renaissance Siena or Florence and the contemporary practice of today. Giovanelli’s Host (2021) zooms in on the quiet, gentle pose of a monk, modestly manufactured with an easy, slow line and mellow modulation of tone. In keeping with the artist’s strategy, the image is purloined from an old painting and then cropped. This process of manipulation is continued by numerous rounds of digital manipulation of the found and trimmed image until Giovanelli finds that the surface begins to speak in a different language, emitting a different light from that previously discovered in the original. Here the reticence of the monk speaks to the self-imposed silence he would have adhered to, yet it is parlayed by the ideogrammatic candour and restraint achieved by the artist’s continued digital manipulation. A surface that appears quintessentially antique is ironically created by techniques so adamantly modern. The bright star of the past now shines ever brighter because of Giovanelli’s contemporary exploration and administration of it. The idyll of the past and the icons that glow within it now sparkle with the lustre that only the now can provide.

CHAPTER II: SEARCHING FOR ABSOLUTENESS IN ABBREVIATION

Keats’ quest to hold on to a moment forever is, of course, innately flawed yet his attempt – linguistically, at least – sees the poet linger over a series of beautifully fecund images that are condensed or boiled down to their fundamental essence. It is there that the bright star of everlasting life, love or hope resides – in the snow upon mountains; on a lover’s ‘ripening breast’; on a mask now ‘soft-fallen’. This strategy of abbreviating a narrative or cropping an image down to the very fulcrum of its meaning and agency chimes with the work of several painters in Bright Star. Lydia Blakeley’s Legacy / Legendary (2024) is made up of two specific, prosaic images: one of old mobile telephones; the other of an old rolodex. Both seemingly as pre-historic now as the fossils found on the beach yet, in their day, considered lodestars of innovation. The close cropping of these relatively innocuous images serves to heighten the subtle enigma they emit; these inherently staged objects and thus subjects now betray a far more performative arc of meaning and it is this animation, triggered from the stasis of forgotten history, that most piques the artist’s interest. These redundant mobile phones and superfluous filing or database tool become actors in a drama of reality, authenticity and recollection. Just as Keats wishes for a moment to remain evermore, so does Blakeley meticulously and dispassionately capture a moment long gone yet captured – ironically – by images downloaded and cropped from online and social media platforms. So it is that what once felt ground-breaking, only to dissolve into the dust of time passed, now curiously feels alive once more because of Blakeley’s intended resurrection not just of their image but on how they – now paintings that command time and appreciation – function in the swipe-up, swipe-left world of abbreviated, addled attention we all live in.

Like Blakeley, Poppy Jones find enigma in everyday images, however, where Blakeley’s subjects are cast in those bright lights of matter and fact, Jones’ enterprise is to bathe her subject in a different glimmer: a velvety narcosis of near monochromatic colour that only serves to magnify both the refinement and transience of her commonplace objects. Spring, sorrow (2024) sits firmly in the language of the Vanitas. A single tulip occupies Jones’ pictorial space, however, she cleverly initiates a performative thrust to her composition by having the tulip’s single leaf create a shadow which makes it appear to gently reach out to itself, like Narcissus absorbed with his beauty. Exercises in light and shadow (and the myriads of meanings that come from those contexts and designs), Jones’ cropped image begins as a photograph which is then mono-printed onto suede; a technique and support that further lends the image its ethereal yet tactile aura. We are left with an image that, like a mantra, allows one to enter a space that delicately blends life and its inexorable end as it passes through time; from found memory to constructed moment and back again to that bright star of timeless objecthood.

The blueprint of abbreviation not only concentrates both moment and meaning, it can also unveil a curtailment or fracture of that which it seeks to amplify. In the case of Sang Woo Kim that source of rent and representation is himself. Kim was born in South Korea and moved to London at a young age. His numerous self-portraits, almost always rendering quotations of just his face, paint him as both insider and outsider. Inside his own physical experience and psychological understanding; outside of the cultural or collective identity within which he now functions as person and artist. The Corner 011 (2024) sees Kim offer a section of his face, dominated by his left cheek. Nose, ear, jawline and eye are all abbreviated, with only his lips presented in full, registered with such aching luminosity to hoodwink the viewer into believing it was executed in tempera. As one stares at Kim’s sur-face one begins to appreciate it in abstract terms so that a certain geometry of simplicity and purity propels the optics of his painting. Kim’s insistence on only presenting shards of a splintered self speaks clearly to his desire to claim his own identity and, in the process, challenge his viewer’s perception of the gaze. Such abbreviation likewise touches on issues of displacement so that the artist’s continued self-exploration, seen only in fragmented terms, highlights the struggles many have when trying to achieve a sense of selfhood and belonging in the arena of cultural hybridity.

Just as Kim’s discussions of self-representation make manifest a mosaic of being, problematized yet legitimized by the process of becoming, so too do Lewis Hammond’s propositions of humanity see the body entangled, unravelled and then reconstituted. Executed on copper (like so many treasures of the early Renaissance), Untitled (2024) is a surface as abstract as it is organic. A cascade of eyes showers down Hammond’s composition, raining across a golden ground agitated by jade, serpentine curlicues that, in their recession and procession, lend the surface a visceral yet entirely alien quality. Interior becomes exterior. Thought becomes reflex. Where Kim plays with familiarity and likeness, Hammond’s take on identity is more intrinsic, digging deeper down into the sheer guts of entity even as that search offers only more puzzle and uncertainty for the viewer. Hammond’s body is now reduced to an abstracted soliloquy of vulnerability, one that eyes harmony yet which only – can only – speak to an endogenous, obsidian dread that questions the very nature, meaning and ultimate dissolution of existence. It is Hammond, more than any other artist in Bright Star, who thus best describes the final rhyming couplet in Keats’ poem and its – indeed, our – inevitable ‘swoon of death’.

CHAPTER III: AGENCY AND ALTERATION

The past decade has seen several artists in London present work that offers some kind of hybrid between figuration and abstraction. Grounds that grumble and sing with an effervescence of being – experienced and remembered; present and past – that in their ongoing metamorphosis offer a new take on the usual binary appreciation of the discipline of painting. Sahara Longe’s Street Scene (2021) finds a cluster of figures all moving in different directions. Whilst many of their faces are smoothly modelled as flat-edged portraits, their bodies are even more simply registered as planes of colour, animated with passages of what looks like hatching that function as highlight or shadow, itch and scratch. Body and street thus blend into one another, both demarcated as puffy lozenges melting into a shared ground that, at times, continues a single passage of colour and, at other times, creates specific boundaries between tones. Longe’s surface is thus built up like an embroidered quilt; in spite of the variation of her figures’ movement and direction, cobalt and navy blues, lilacs and tangerine tones stitch together the soft ground that ebbs in and out of compositional structure and figural fleshiness. The light of harmony prevails, even as the figures push in one direction and the ground exhales in another.

The same tessellation of swollen nebula of euphonious colours commands the ground of Antonia Showering’s Your Niece (2020). Hazy clusters of terracotta, sage and peach tones coagulate on the surface, choreographed as much by the forces of gravity as by the artist’s own hand given that Showering’s aqueous, abstract surface is first established by allowing her base layers of paint to pool together merely by moving her canvas, allowing chance to dictate the primordial ground, thus recalling the automatism of the Surrealists and the practice of artists like Johns or Rauschenberg. It is from here that Showering then dives into her found ground and builds up her curious, Delphian figures, at once hieratic yet pensive, even troubled. What remains, however, is not a distinction between figure and ground but the slippage each makes into the other; the two figures here knocked back into the contours of the painting’s ground. Environment bleeds into body; geology acts as physiology; self becomes other. Just as Keats personifies his own bright star, pleading to it to satiate his desire for everlasting love, Showering, too, raises the same issues around subjectivity, memory and the hunger to be at one with another by making body and landscape one and the same.

George Rouy offers more than flux and the accidental synergy such alteration can provide. Instead, Rouy presents his viewer with a tempest: cacophonous chords of discord screech across his canvas as bodies float to the surface in moments of registration only for those bodies to sink deeper and darker into the artist’s ground, subsumed by an electric vortex of mark, gesture, brush and colour. Ethereal Bleeding (2023) powerfully displays the artist’s ongoing dialogue between representation and transformation. For Rouy, the body is a vessel vexed yet blessed, bobbing between privilege and estrangement. He tests his figures with the Herculean labour of surviving forces of abstraction that incite black holes of absorption, tsunamis of expansion, ever charging and changing the compositional ground. Yet from such tumult, Rouy finds rhapsody. Even as his figures lose their physiognomy, their faces bleeding into the ether, their corporeal energy remains bright and alive, so that selfhood, despite the crises into which it is thrown, can – and does – resist and endure. Hope and harmony battle with doubt and incarceration with the result being a cryptic yet sententious visual language – much like ancient hieroglyphs – that captures the beauty and horror of contemporary experience.

The adagio of Rouy’s surface is continued in the jewel-like mosaics of Flora Yukhnovich’s work. As Keats turns to the bright stars of the past to find hope for his future, so too does Yukhnovich begin her wrestle with paint by grappling with art history. The artist has been inspired by numerous artists and epochs of painting, most notably the leading lights of the Rococo movement. In Lickety Split (2020) Yukhnovich has turned to Titian, with her abstraction divulging only snippets of recognition of her source, puncturing the fizz and lick of her opulent surface, built up with pastilles of jade, burgundy and sun-kissed flesh, allowing the viewer to – just for a second – catch the shape and contour of the Venetian master’s Bacchus and Ariadne (c. 1520-23, London, National Gallery) (a painting with an octet of bright stars in its upper left corner). If Rouy’s turn is one of contest, then the flux that fuels Yukhnovich’s enterprise is one not born of dissonance but of that Keatsian desire for coalition, visually and strategically. Yukhnovich’s brush choreographs and orchestrates, even as her painted surface slips, slides and dribbles with action. Figure and ground no longer seek to maintain any independence from each other: each single mark, whilst serving to embody and describe phenomenologically, is simultaneously loaded, empowered to meander, dance and splurge with the flexibility and abandon of abstraction. Yukhnovich continues Keats’ temporal, epochal slippage with her title. ‘Lickety split’ literally means ‘as fast as possible’ (fitting, given the zip of the artist’s brush), however, as with all of Yukhnovich’s titles, a cultural layer of contemporary (often deliberately vacuous) pop is sprinkled into the mix given that Lickety Split is not only the name of an Australian rock band but, more crucially, is the name of a shiny, lavender earth pony from the My Little Pony universe. High meets low; love meets lust as the past tumbles into the present once more.

CHAPTER IV: LANDSCAPE AS DREAMSCAPE

Keats’ appeal to his bright star is one that resounds with vivid images provided by nature. He writes of ‘moving waters’, ‘earth’s human shores’ and ‘snow upon the mountains and the moors’ when describing the temporary constitution of nature’s seasons, in contrast to the permanence he so craves for his undying love for his ‘fair love’. Even as Keats’ descriptions remain easily readable, the musicality of his poesy, and the astral swish from one moment to another lends his narration a dreamlike quality. It is this conversion of ‘scapes, from land to dream; from penetrable earth to orphic, celestial realms that we find - in varying degrees of esotericism – in the work of Aaron Ford and Lewis Brander.

Ford’s enterprise is driven by a concern with history and the contemporary symbols we choose to illustrate and signpost it. In Mountain Top (2023), executed in Rome whilst Ford was studying there at the British School at Rome, positions individual marks as lenses now memories as materials become attributes - lying like only the truth ever does - and their exciting yet cryptic imbroglio consequently nourishing the mellifluous poesy of his brush. Ford’s journey begins with a decidedly slippery symbol. One which has hopscotched through history in various blooms of recrudescence. In the case of this painting that emblematic pith is found in the figure of Hannibal: Carthage’s beloved general who instigated the Second Punic War with the Romans by invading Italy, famously crossing the Alps with his herd of elephants as he did so. For Ford, Hannibal satisfies the status of both hero and anti-hero: given his Carthaginian (now Tunisian) heritage he has now become an icon of Black excellence, yet his appearance has been whitewashed (mainly in marble) throughout history, and especially so in Rome with whom he waged war. Lubricating the exposure of Hannibal as both Sign and Signifier is a process that likewise layers a variety of different practices so that, in their communion, Ford directs then redirects the optic and orphic propensity of the image he decides upon. So it is that landscape seems to jump through time; presence now becomes haunted by phantoms of history or myth that coalesce like abstraction, excavated from the very registration they obfuscate whilst, all the while, his image seems to gently broil with the friction of the indices invested in them. Ford’s painting - both his object and craft - is thus born from the art of interrogation. One that debates the chameleonic antagonism and consequence of Hannibal as hero or enemy; as European or African but also illuminates the various lenses - material and conceptual - employed by him that, in their sophisticated synergism, empowers Ford’s deep dive into the glyphs of symbolic power and, ultimately, of the anxiety of truth.

Like Ford, Lewis Brander is a painter who references cultural significance in emblems of space and place and is also an artist who seeks to engage with the alterity his own family history provides in such an investigation given that his ancestors were refugees from Eastern Europe. Above the top of Ford’s mountain hovers the mystery and transience of the sky: that quantum space closest to the final boundary before earthly becomes celestial. It is the sky and its ever-shifting spectrum of colour and light that chiefly interests Brander. Energized by numerous art-historical sources, Brander’s London (2024) speaks to the prismatic fog of Turner and the evanescence of Rothko. Colour is so gently modulated as to almost feel invisible across the quiet stillness of Brander’s object and touch. Light ebbs and flows, much like the twinkle of Keats’ star, offering not just a physical or meteorological pulse to the surface, but also evincing the passing of time, from moment to moment, from worldly to sublime. We are left with the most gentle texture, born from experience, but which seems only to flourish when sparked by the hopes and dreams of the viewer’s eye, left alone to wander around Brander’s composition like a Wordsworthian cloud.

CHAPTER V: LOVE AND LONGING

Whilst Keats’ odyssey through the impermanence of Nature and experience feeds – in contradistinction - his impossible imploring for immortality, the sonnet is, in the final analysis, about love and longing. Emotions that get straight to the very heart of Romanticism’s quest. Love is, as the song goes, a many splendored-thing: for Keats it reveals itself when ‘pillow’d’ upon [his] fair love’s ripening breast’. For Alvaro Barrington, that great shaman of an artist whose practice, like the alchemist, transforms the everyday into the wonderful as it throws known deep into the unknown, love – and the longing for it – takes many forms. The artist has, for many years, turned to hibiscus flowers as a way of engaging with intimacy, with the flower carrying several meanings depending on its colour (yellow ones are associated with happiness and good luck – both of which, alas, escaped Keats). Hibiscus Colour Study (Yellow, P) (2024) sees Barrington treat his sunny hibiscus like a wormhole that transports him back to the island of Grenada where he grew up (note the single trail of zooming white that pierces the very centre of the flower just like light is consumed by a black hole). The claret, relatively flat background that projects the flower out of the pictorial space is inspired by sign paintings commonly found on the beaches of the Caribbean. Barrington’s big, yellow flower is Keats’ bright star: both suns that emit the light of memory; both guide the viewer from one dimension to another; both nurture and are fed by the love we all want whilst describing so eloquently the throb of our longing for it: to begin, to grow and to never end.

Like Barrington, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s work is predicated upon the dynamos of displacement, dislocation and reinvention; energies that provide the artist with various lenses through which to explore the intersection between Queerness and Blackness. Untitled (2024) unveils a large figure, set against a plainly mottled ground interrupted with passages of mark and pattern. Monumental, the body occupies nearly all the pictorial space subtly recalling the poise of Greek’s sculptures. Compositionally operating like an isosceles triangle, the muscular body – wide chest, parted arms – seems captured at the peak of inhaling, suspended in a transient almost meditative state. Pigmented turquoise brushstrokes surround the head and softly enhance the figure’s features yet their identity remains concealed. Representation collapses, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s figure lingers between reality and memory. Form, technique (and thus meaning) function to illuminate the liminality Hwami feels: the image chiming with a surface that bubbles in and out of physical, painterly and existential density, resulting in a painting that renders, more than anything else, the journey of selfhood and struggle for self-understanding, even as it hints to the longing - even impossibility - for such self-determination to effloresce.

EPILOGUE: OUR LOVE WRIT IN WATER

Hwami’s journey – like that of all these artists – is to the revelation of representation; to a space of comfort and self-understanding which requires both effort to endure and commitment to articulate. Hwami shares Keats’ ambition for self-realisation: in his case to grasp, then keep a love he no longer holds yet which he desires to keep forever by asking Polaris to stop the wheels of time itself. Keats’ bright star is thus journey and destination: an icon that guides; a citadel that nourishes and yet, unavoidably, remains an ache that cannot be stilled nor stopped but only gets more traumatic. The result being the final breaths Keats so desires to hear; not just those of his fair love, but his own. One last deep exhalation before he swoons to his death and into the annals of the unknown.

We are all looking for that bright star. That guide. That answer. That reason for why we’re on this mortal coil. Keats’ poetry delved deep into the mysteries of life not just to try to explain it, but to eke out of it as much love and vitality as he could. His was a pursuit and passion for love and self-determination as poetic and problematic as trying to write your name in water. The same can be said of this group of artists, nearly all working in London, whose work ultimately celebrates landscapes of love and pillars of being and the dreams we create to allow us to hope for, long for and cultivate them. That love is for the bounty of life; our temporary presence and project invested in the promise that, in this challenging world we live in, the spirit and power of art can shine bright – from London to Rome and beyond - like Keats’ star, offering debate, some meaning and even a little refuge for us all.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
16-20 January 2025