LUKE ELWES: SECRET WATER
BROADBENT LONDON
3 September - 10 October 2009
View the online catalogue (3mb adobe acrobat file)
Luke Elwes, Fruit (Secret Water 24), 2008, watercolour on paper, 56 x 76 cm
Over the past two years a small patch of ground at Landermere Creek has become a roofless studio for Luke Elwes. Here, time and the seasons have washed over successive sheets of paper taped onto old boards and wooden bench tops. What emerges in the fluid engagement with earth, water and paper is as much to do with the transient light, the sea breeze and rising tide as with what is rapidly enacted on a white surface with crayon, pen, ink and watercolour.
Luke Elwes, Spring (Secret Water 15), 2008, watercolour on paper, 56 x 76 cm
The transience of the natural realm is reflected in the making process for Luke Elwes. Each piece captures a unique moment in a continually evolving environment - succumbing to a brisk sea breeze, an enveloping winter mist, or to a sudden downpour. Pigment dissolves, runs and dries in unforeseen ways (and with unexpected results) as the paper’s surface becomes rain spattered, mud flecked, or simply chilled and dampened by the seasonal air. And each time the resulting image belongs as much to the elements as to the artist who began it.
Luke Elwes. Landermere July 2009
LUKE ELWES: PEINTURES RECENTES
GALERIE MARCEAU BASTILLE, PARIS
30 APRIL - 30 SEPTEMBER 2009
In his paintings Luke Elwes explores the landscape of memory. As well as recording particular journeys (to North Africa, Tibet and central America), the paintings reveal, like a hieroglyphic text, the many layers of history buried beneath the surfaces of these places. They become maps of the ‘geographical unconscious’, suggesting both the trail of our presence and the passage of time. As Odilon Redon put it, they place ‘the logic of the visible in the service of the invisible’.
Luke Elwes exhibits regularly with Art First Contemporary Art in London and New York, as well as, more recently, with Galleria Ceribelli in Bergamo Italy. The paintings in this exhibition are chosen by (have been selected) the artist from (come from) the recent Refugia series and it is (represents) the first opportunity to see his recent work in Paris since 2001.
A travers ses peintures Luke Elwes explore le paysage de la mémoire.
Ses œuvres sont la trace des voyages de l’artiste, en Afrique de Nord, au Tibet et en Amérique Centrale. Elles révèlent, tel des Hiéroglyphes, les différentes couches de l’histoire enfouies sous ces paysages. Chaque tableau est une carte de la « géographie inconsciente », il révèle les traces laissées par notre présence et par le passage du temps. Selon la citation d’Odilon Redon :« La logique du visible au service de l’invisible »
Luke Elwes vit et travaille à Londres. Il est régulièrement exposé à la Galerie Art First Contemporary Art à Londres et à New-York, ainsi que plus récemment à la Galleria Ceribelli à Bergame en Italie. Les peintures exposées viennent de sa récente série « Refugia ». Elles ont été choisies par L’artiste qui n’a pas exposé à Paris depuis 2001.
LUKE ELWES: REFUGIA
ART FIRST LONDON
11 SEPTEMBER - 10 OCTOBER 2007
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Luke Elwes
Refugia
11th September – 10th October, 2007
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Refugium/Refugia: Term used in biology to refer to an area where organisms continue to survive through periods of extreme or unfavorable conditions.
With these paintings, Luke Elwes continues to expand the range of his concerns, incorporating his own travels - to the Tibetan Plateau, the Djebel Sarhro mountains in Morocco, and the Mayan sites of Central America - with the conceptual mapping of physical and historical space, and the impact of time and memory on the 'geographical unconscious'.
CATALOGUE text by Anthony Fawcett, published by Art First, London & New York,2007)
The timing of this exhibition seems strange but appropriate. As I write the sound of musicians are ringing out across the globe in honor of Live Earth. It seems to symbolize a challenge which is now building with breathless urgency.
My immediate response to your work was raw – it seemed to take me back to the Pilgrim series and then to re-evoke the feelings of pain which I experienced when I tried to engage with it back in 1997. The contemplative calm which permeates the work seems too transcendental to me. Damn it, I say to myself, I had enough of this stuff with Catholicism and now my friend is back doing his bloody moon walk again – who needs it?
Well, clearly me for a start – art is supposed to challenge us in exactly this way. When I first saw the images of earth beamed back at us from space during our childhood I was full of wonder. I still am. But when I try to live my daily life it can just feel too damned hard. The pain we all have to face…bereavement, sickness, old age, death, the need to earn a daily crust, the difficulty of anger, the need for love, the weight of responsibility…what are we doing here? None of us know the answer to this.
However, we do know that through millennia we keep creating art. Our ancestors descend to paint on the walls of caves. The need for food and shelter is interrupted. Something sacred stirs. A new dimension emerges in our relationship to the world and to each other. Thousands of years later Chaim Soutine hangs a rotting carcass in a Parisian apartment and starts to paint with venom and fire. A new century sounds which produces two such barbaric wars that there can be few whom we know whose family did not lose loved ones. On the wall of my apartment I have a photograph of my grandmother’s family in New Zealand. It still seems heartbreaking to me that the two eldest boys were dead within five years of it being taken. If we are this poor at getting along with each other then how on earth (on earth indeed….) are we supposed to save the planet into the bargain….
So, what are you up to, my friend? What would Chaim Soutine have made of your work? If he were me then he would have howled in frustration and chucked your CD at the wall and then realized first, that this need for ascent is essential – probably as important now as at any point in our history - and that, secondly, his/my own considerably less patient and more fiery temperament could do with the occasional reminder of the need for belief and inspiration, that beauty can be a refuge and that the world can still enchant. Whatever we are up to, transcendence seems to me to imply a recognition that the self centered rush of our everyday lives needs context and that the context extends to horizons which we cannot see but which we must preserve.
This work is full of transcendence. Even when you are not evoking the nature of the globe itself (Locus, Corpus) you’re still giving us aerial views (Cross, Blue Passage, Trail). Jeez, kid, you are so bloody high that you give me vertigo. I find it irritatingly cerebral and polished but it is certainly provocative and breathtakingly beautiful.
My favorites are Maya and Ascent. Maya because it reminds me of my two trips to Mount Kailash – the mountain seems to loom in the background, suggestive rather than literal; a single square beckons – an opening into another way for a weary pilgrim short of breath on the roof of the world – an evocation of the notion that we must travel into the heart of the mountain as well as around it. I see the mist which would so often lie on the Himalayan mountains when I first caught the morning light; and the sense that spiritual truth is not something which can be explained but only experienced.
Ascent is interesting because it is a painting in which the perspective does not seem as obviously elevated as most of the others (its title therefore intrigues me). It is more suggestive to me of charting a course through a channel, feeling our way forward into an unmapped sea, reminding me of the great myths of the Mediterranean: Odysseus or Jason. So that is where I will end – interesting that the sense of ascent leads me to a sea-bound journey. But finishing with the sea seems appropriate – a reminder of your years on Osea, a counterpoint to your own love of the desert - and, of course, when photographed from space the earth is not the green of the environmental activists but the blue of the great folk tradition of the American south.
Anthony Fawcett
New York
July 2007
LUKE ELWES: FLOWING GROUND
BROADBENT LONDON
21 JUNE - 23 JULY 2005
This new series has grown out of a twin impulse, the wish to explore the visual field with the most direct means available - minerals, matter, water and paper - and to do it by taking one patch of ground, a small island, and looking at it deeply, again and again, to see what it yields.
It is also a private and radical response to a larger problem - namely, how to picture the world and what media to adopt as the most valid vehicle for its exploration? This question has become more complicated as the range of technical possibilities open to artists both expands and becomes more rapidly obsolete, and as the language and terms of one method - painting, photography, digital media - is infiltrated and overturned by another.
Painting especially seems to have lost ground in this accelerating process, increasingly prone to critical judgements which signal its demise on one day and its new ‘triumph’ on the next.
So to return to drawing at this juncture - the impulse that lies at the root of so many visual systems - is also to return to first principles, to start over with the simplest contact between hand and eye, as an unencumbered way to locate and map out the subtle complexities of our response to the transient nature of the seen world. It is a matter not only of acting, but of receiving. As my deepening experience of one place - Osea Island in the Blackwater estuary - is overlayed with new responses, so the need to work directly in the territory I am exploring has grown. The island has become an extension of the studio, a space where thought, memory and action arise simultaneously. As this series has grown over the last two years, so the distance between the world outside and the world in the studio has all but vanished.
The island is a contained world, a parcel of earth illuminated by sky and water and shaped by tide and wind. Its interior is a wilderness that mutates with the seasons, the vibrant buzz and fecund bloom of summer fields disappearing beneath the stark silhouettes and white mists of wintertime; while at its margins, a potent liminal space arises from the constant tension between liquidity and solidity. On some days the fractured tracery and meandering lines of its soft boundaries spill outwards into glistening black space; on others, the water rises up to meet the sky, dissolving the surface into a vast expanse of blue and silver light. Being there, moving through it, is to become progressively immersed in its elemental rhythms, the drawings a natural result of this engagement. A sheet of paper is worked on - sometimes urgently, sometimes with measured slowness - using pens, crayon, ink and pigment, but also river water, mud, dust, grass and rain. The mental picture instinctively combines with the random event. The drawing is both a representation of, and an intense submersion in the moment. It hovers between the thing seen and the sensation evoked.
The marks on the paper slide in and out of recognition, acting both as rapid transcriptions and abstract notations. They combine near and far, exploring the surface while also touching the distant space above and beneath it. The specifics of the visual world are unpicked and reassembled, the resulting images covering a spectrum of possiblities as they arise: some drawings returning to the closely observed, others drifting through non - specific passages of light and dark, evoking a less tangible space, often less seen than felt.
The drawings mark the beginning of a process but also the process itself. How they evolve is as much about the materials used and how the medium works on any given day as about a specific visual starting point. Whether a reflective reacquaintance with familiar ground or an instinctive response to some unexpected stimulus ( a shell, butterfly, blossom), they are about the significance of looking, remaining alive to the transience and mutability of that act of perception. They travel not so much widely as deeply, absorbing and probing the natural flow of phenomena and the passage of time. From the lines, marks and washes emerges a landscape where much of ‘what is essential is invisible to the eye.’
Luke Elwes
April 2005
LUKE ELWES: COMPASS
ART FIRST LONDON
8 SEPTEMBER - 7 OCTOBER 2004
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Like points on a compass, the images in Luke Elwes's new paintings move the eye backwards and forwards, between open sky and dark earth, the sea of sand the the sea of water. They track the ground that runs between presence and absence, navigating home ground or distant, unfamiliar territory.
This is Luke's fourth exhibition with Art First. A new departure in the recent work is evident in a beautiful group of mixed media paintings on paper. These throw fresh light on the subtle layering of washes and the marks of elemental mapping in the large canvases, which themselves re-visit the discoveries he made in the paintings for Pilgrim (based on an expedition to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar in Tibet), Sanctuary (derived from a journey to the cave complexes in Cappadocia, Central Turkey) and Osea (an island only a few hours drive from London).
Text by Sue Hubbard (The Independent, Sep 21, 2004)
THE MAP has become for many a modern painter and poet a metaphorical, almost sacred object. In a secular world it exerts a fascination; the empty spaces and the unknown territories beckon. To travel has become synonymous with the pilgrim's journey into the heart of darkness. It is to lay oneself open to new experiences, to new ways of seeing the world. The place between "here" and "somewhere else" may be the very place that must be traversed in order to reach "there", to know, as Eliot said, "the place for the first time".
The Christian pilgrimage was both an actual journey and a voyage to the centre of the self, while psychoanalysis is often described in terms of travel in an unknown land. To be a true pilgrim requires that one is watchful, observant, aware of subtle shifts and changes - both in the external landscape through which one travels as well as in the internal. In the silence of the wilderness we are able to rediscover the language of memory and our links with what is ancient; the stars, the sea, the wind.
Over the past decade, the painter Luke Elwes has made journeys to the tablelands of the Hopi Indians in New Mexico, the central Australian desert, the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, and to the Buddhist sacred mountain Mount Kailash in the Tibetan plateau. The result has been a series of landscapes that not only captures something of the physicality of these sacred places but which also speaks of the empty loneliness that is at the spiritual core of much creativity.
"Compass" is Elwes's fourth exhibition at the London gallery Art First. The mixed-media paintings on paper, created by subtle layers of washes and marks, signal a shift of emphasis, while also revisiting the concerns of his series "Pilgrim" (based on the expedition to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar in Tibet), "Sanctuary" (which grew from a journey to the caves of Cappadocia) and "Osea" (inspired by an island only a couple of hours from London).
His oils on linen deal with the contrast between dark and light, space and edges. Compass, a monochromatic ellipse, might be read as a sacred eye, whilst also suggesting something of a medieval Mappa Mundi, created around a central sacred place such as Jerusalem or Rome. Although implicitly abstract, the physical world is never far away in these paintings; they suggest the expansive horizons of sea or the sky breaking from night into dawn. Light emanates from beyond the edge of a fecund semi-circle in Gaze (above), again suggesting the pupil of an eye or the edge of a planet revolving in deep space.
Elwes's territory is both familiar and strange, distant and yet somehow known. As the French philosopher-poet Gaston Bachelard wrote in Poetics of Space, "We cover the universe with drawings we have lived." The thinly layered surfaces echo patterns of weather and erosion; marks are made then washed away or erased. Ancient pathways across plains, deserts or fields are suggested to create, as Elwes has said, "spaces which are mapped by belief rather than measured by science". These pathways are markers in the emptiness of the canvas, making sense of the space as they also attempt to make sense of the world.
Sue Hubbard September 2004
LUKE ELWES: PAINTINGS
ART FIRST NEW YORK
16 OCTOBER - 15 NOVEMBER 2002
Luke Elwes' work is a potent mixture of exploration and meditation, a journey intent on mapping and integrating a path that is both internal and external.
The remote and ancient terrain he has sought out deserts, mountains and, most recently, islands - has become fertile ground for his increasingly poetic and inventive use of paint.
His singular voice was identified early on by critics and collectors and his work has gained a significant following during a decade of successful exhibitions in London and Paris.
Now for the first time in New York Elwes will show a new group of paintings which combine his ongoing encounter with the small British island of Osea - a wild and marginal landscape - with a recent visit to Osprey Island off the coast of Maine. Through these latest journeys Elwes' work has achieved a new and exciting synthesis.
LUKE ELWES: THE OSEA PAINTINGS
ART FIRST LONDON
10 APRIL - 9 MAY 2002
Chardin might have been speaking for all painters when he said of painting that, "it was an island whose shore I have skirted".
In a series of large abstract paintings that emerge directly out of his two-year long investigation of the landscape of Osea island Luke Elwes takes Chardin's evocative metaphor and gives it shimmering new resonances. A few hours' drive from London, Osea's wild, flat marshlands and empty, windswept skies have become for the artist a point of departure and a place of return. Dore Ashton wrote of Robert Motherwell, "He travels abroad and in doing so returns to his own source."
For most of Luke Elwes' artistic career he has travelled and painted. But he is no travel painter. His extensive journeys, and through them his exposure to the culture, beliefs, and landscape of others, have acted as a catalyst for his own line of enquiry into the nature of our relationship to the world. This exploration can be traced back to the artist's decisive encounter with the desert at the start of the 1990s. After a decade of journeys to distant parts of the world the Central Australian Desert, East Africa's Great Rift Valley, New Mexico, Mount Kailash in Tibet and Cappadocia in Turkey there is implicit in the new work a sense of homecoming.
The artist's acute observation of the physical world, his preoccupation with the flow of time and matter as it is manifested on Osea, rewards us with canvases suffused with ambient light and the colours of water where it breaks and dissolves into earth.
Luke's paintings brim with the luminous silence of an intimacy that approaches awe and derives from a kind of looking that has been described as tenderness towards experience. It is this quality of felt intimacy that draws us so compelling into the paintings' sphere, holds and instructs us there.
In the summer of 2002 Luke will continue his investigation of islands when he visits a wild, coniferous-forested granite island off Maine's rugged coast. Ospreys are the guardians of this far-flung piece of wilderness. Osea and Osprey Islands will both feature in Luke's first exhibition with Art First New York in October 2002.
CS and FMD
LUKE ELWES: SANCTUARY
ART FIRST LONDON
7 MARCH - 30 MARCH 2000
Catalogue text by Nicholas Usherwood
LUKE ELWES: PILGRIM
ART FIRST LONDON
3 FEBRUARY - 5 MARCH 1998