Alexander Massouras: Terms and Conditions

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Willoughby Gerrish is pleased to announce Terms and Conditions, the first exhibition of paintings by Alexander Massouras at Thirsk Hall Sculpture Garden. The exhibition will present a new series of paintings showing windows picked out by bright light: the window admits the light, which in turn describes the form of the window. These are the latest in a sequence of Massouras’s projects that translate aspects of photography—such as camera flare, or the chromatic range of C-Type prints—back into painting. In chemical photography, the light makes the image; here, Massouras makes that process manual, using highlights as the principal method of painterly description. 

Leon Battista Alberti once described painting as a window: 'I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish’, he wrote, ‘which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint'. Seeing 'what I want to paint' is an early and tantalising account of something between imagination and observation, full of circularity in describing the transition between one and the other. Where Massouras introduces blinds into the windows, that back-and-forth is given visual expression: sometimes it is the blind that is painted, sometimes the image through it. This process in turn gives form to the enduring conversation between abstraction and representation in con temporary painting. A painting is both a window and a wall, something looked through (for its image or its meaning) and looked at (as a flat surface covered with paint). The blinds and windows of Terms and Conditions express this dualism of surface and illusion.