GUY ALLOTT: SUPER STATES

About

In Guy Allott's landscape paintings, the very distant past and the far-flung future merge. His scenes are replete with improbabilities and anachronisms: fiery mackerel skies, jolly-but-sad spacecrafts (evocative of 1960s toys rather than actual rockets), and discontinuous natural panoramas that clash with one another. For all their other worldliness, however, the places Allott paints are to some extent real. He manages to plumb the depths of the history of landscape painting, both real and surreal 'from Watteau, Lorrain, and English Romanticism to Magritte, Nash and Sci-Fi' and emerge onto the other side. The resultant imagery transfixes in its discordance, somehow hauntingly relevant. Nature for Allott is an unruly and strange presence, always cultured but always beyond it, an enigmatic mix that draws us back insistently to the idea of landscape - this most fundamental of encounters.