Paul Hamlyn: New Paintings. "Secret Garden"

About

It was an offer gladly accepted and the work in this show reflects the many hours spent working and wandering around in that exceptional place In his essay about the work Timothy Hyman comments that ‘Although we could call him a “landscape painter”, there seems always a whiff of the planetary in Paul Hamlyn’s imagery of tree and leaf and stone, a sense of the cosmic as well as the microcosmic. Our close encounter with the markings on the silvery pale bark of a branch is somehow inflected with the detachment of a scientist – or a visiting astronaut. I think of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, where the scientist Kris stares into organic plant life and sees it in its cosmic identity – where man is marginal.’ Hamlyn starts each work drawing and painting directly from nature, laying down broad gestural landscape ideas. Then back in the confines of his studio he transports these quiet fragments of an English garden through time, space and imagination into an unsettling, alien version of his secret world; not so much a place as a state of mind. Peering through the branches of trees and foliage at a universe full of dark matter we are invited to engage simultaneously with the familiar and the cosmological. From a tree trunk, through the middle distance to outer space, near and far unite so that when the moon hangs in the foreground like a polished pebble, it is a polished pebble.