Richard Wathen: New Paintings

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'I consider all of the portraits to be self-portraits. The starting point is usually a memory or feeling that will then proceed to sifting through pre-existing images. This might be a face or an item of clothing but will often have a feeling of memory or history.' - Richard Wathen Appearing at once both contemporary and historical, and intriguingly titled Man Whose Head Expanded, a seemingly young man with neat blue hair and wearing a classical tunic stares out from a plain lilac background; in another painting — Man Whose Head Diminished — a face disturbingly similar to the first but older and wearing a multi-coloured Elizabethan-style ruff seems to emerge out of the canvas. Richard Wathen's new show for Max Wigram Gallery comprises his disturbing, anatomically distorted self-portraits that reflect on time and age and art history. His paintings draw inspiration from a variety of periods, mixed with disguised, self-fashioned autobiographic references. Wathen considers his paintings to be manifestations of something previously unconsidered brought into view. Beginning as self-portraits, he intentionally redefines his subjects' personhood applying the Cubists' idea of multiple viewpoints, to the concept of time. His painting Olive, is not the oddity of a young girl with grey hair, but a portrait containing all the ages of the sitter at once, reflecting human experience and life, and rendering ambiguities of gender, age and loss. Wathen's own experiences have always informed his work, drawing on his childhood, faces remembered from films he watched as a teenager and ‘found' memories. He deliberately intends the viewer to feel unsettled and uncomfortable whilst inviting a personal engagement meant to inform their understanding of the world. Wathen's children's portraits are part of the major historical survey Of Angels and Urchins: 400 Years of Children's Portraiture at Kunsthalle Krems in Austria, opening on 6 March.