Fabian Peake - I Believe in Dragons

About

I Believe in Dragons is an exciting new exhibition of work by the English artist Fabian Peake (b. 1942). Peake defines himself as a painter (he is also a musician and a poet) and his work encompasses painting, tailored fabric pieces, cut-outs, folded drawings and text. His practice is wall-based. For Peake the wall has many guises and outfits: and it is around the spatial conundrum of the wall that he does his thinking. Music, poetry and the making of objects fuse together here through the context of the wall. Its intriguing, integral flatness and that relationship with three-dimensional 'reality' preoccupy Peake's thoughts. Where does the influence of the wall space begin and end? How far from the wall can a piece of work move before it is in ‘real' space? The wall becomes, what might be termed, a 'psychological' space for the artist. It is in the conspicuous display of the interaction of the image and its physical situation where opposites and incompatibilities strive to co-exist and where the artist is choreographer. Peake delights in the complexities of the spatial conundrum. Visual conflicts are teased out through colour, the materiality of strength and delicacy, along with surface tensions and the contradictions of time: formal references to pre-Renaissance paintings are coupled with images of the readymade object. Indeed Peake's wall-pieces and cut-outs continue their conversations within the broader spatial realm of CHELSEA FUTURESPACE itself.