Sam Windett

About

The Approach is pleased to present London-based painter Sam Windett’s exhibition Motorway IV. The title is a nod to the M4, surreptitiously evoking themes of time, movement and repetition resulting from the artist’s drives around the South West of England but also reflect on more globalised notions of travel. The paintings are caught in a strange hinterland between abstraction, narrative and figuration. Windett’s distinctive variations of mark-making and textured surfaces has developed into his characteristic collaging style that involves the application of paper, charcoal and acrylic, spray and oil paints.

The paintings are like broken landscapes. Scrambled black and white surfaces reflect the wet road or the static of a car radio and the surrounding darkness of a night drive. References to radio compound not only through painterly representations of white noise, but in dial-like forms and the repeated letters FM and AM. The recurring motif of the disc doubles up both as suns and moons or the headlights of approaching cars. In the smaller canvases, cell structures resemble the veins of leaves, plants or invented ribcages. Seemingly organic forms contradict their evolution from the motif of fragmented mechanical bodies in earlier paintings of aeroplanes or drones.

Dusk or twilight travel becomes a permeating presence within these paintings. Windett’s exhibition makes oblique reference to Christopher Petit’s film Radio On (1979), a British road-trip movie which uses both the M4 and the A4 as its unremarkable backdrop. The film’s stark monochrome aesthetic is interpreted in the paintings with punctuations of dark blues and vibrant reds and greens.