Christopher Page | Shadows & Reflections

About

These new canvases deepen and complicate the ongoing dialogue in Page’s work between light and space, both actual and virtual. In this exhibition, the viewer encounters uncannily blank mirrors that do not reflect back, and gestural ‘paintings’ mounted within colourful frames that appear to have shadows dancing across their surfaces. They are all entirely flat illusions—softly brushed oil paint masquerading as chamfered wood, faceted glass, gestural ‘painting’, light and shadow. These seductive and confounding paintings call into question the framed artwork on the one hand, and the ambient lighting of the gallery on the other, encouraging us to meditate on the embodied conditions of our viewing. 

The paintings in Shadows & Reflections combine the deceptions of Baroque trompe l’oeil with the frankness of Modernist ‘colour field’ abstraction into a paradoxical and haunting suite of paintings. While trompe l’oeil seeks to deceive, and Modernism tried to unveil, Page’s paintings both beguile and heighten consciousness at once. And while they draw from art history, it is to our moment now that these paintings speak. For the other place where Modernism and trompe l’oeil collapse into one another is on the computer screens that we daily stare into, whose interfaces seem rational and Modern, and yet are subtly gilded with the Baroque deceptions of illusory light, faux textures, shadows and reflections.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Dr Patrick Crowley, Associate Curator of European Art at Cantor Arts Centre, Stanford University. 

Christopher Page (b.1984, UK) lives and works in London. He received his MFA from Yale School of Art, 2011 and has exhibited at Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He has taken part in the Instituto Inclusartiz residency program in Rio de Janeiro, and the Container Artist Residency 01. His work is in the collection of Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. He is an Editor of Effects, a journal of art, poetry and essays; for more information see here.