Kes Richardson | Garden Paintings

About

FOLD Gallery | London is pleased to present Garden Paintings by Kes Richardson, his first solo exhibition with the gallery. This also coincides with the announcement of his representation by FOLD Gallery | London. Taking formal garden design as a starting point, Richardson is showing a series of large paintings with a central geometric motif subjected to varying levels of erasure, repetition and concealment. For Richardson, formal gardens represent a miniaturisation of nature as an attempt to contain and confine the Burkean Sublime. He sees parallels with man's impotent desire to tame and control nature and the attempts to mimic it throughout the history of painting. Formal gardens also evoke a sense of transcendence and purity similar to the lofty ideals of Rothko or Newman; a space for divine contemplation. Richardson's paintings both embrace these values and reject them, sitting somewhere between the spiritual and the corporeal. Their means of construction is laid bare without technical trickery, a process of scaling-up small drawings with detached paint application. The resulting works brazenly reveal their simplicity and dumbness yet also evoke quietude and reflection.