Exhibition
Charles Irvin: Mixtus Orbis
26 Aug 2023 – 25 Sep 2023
Regular hours
- Saturday
- 12:00 – 16:00
“For a brief green flash, we all get to feel the possibility of another, parallel world.”
About
Worldbuilding began as a literary device. Writers invent flora, fauna, new modes of transportation, and entire human races to arrive at another plausible reality. Oftentimes, these worlds are proximate to our own, as if over the next hill, strange, unknowable encounters are ever possible. It’s this uncanny nearness that can make such worlds all the more affecting to enter.Less often are painters called world builders, though there are many who have set out such a task and succeeded. M.C. Escher. Leonora Carrington. Remedios Varo. Hieronymus Bosch. Unlike fantasy literature or science fiction films, there aren’t usually names for the elements of a painter’s world, which makes it all the more disorienting and intuitive. Only vision can access this plane of existence.
The work of Charles Irvin gently presents a striking new world to the viewer in celestial blues and creamy browns. At first glance Irvin World seems like a pleasant place, mostly consisting of mountains, oceans and sunsets— classic subjects for a painter — but these landscapes are alien, and the beings who live there are not part of any terrestrial mythology. Here, the light almost looks like our own, and yet its beams seem to strike our eyes with a kind of unfamiliar brilliance, making the viewer a little unsteady and heightening our awareness with the subtle threat of the unknown.
Irvin’s reality is not a perceived reality but an imaginal one. His landscapes are closer to the curious child’s than the plein air painter who copies what their eye can see. When young children paint a mountain, they do not concern themselves with the actual grey mountains out their window; they paint their own, personal mountain. They are building their inner world.