Simon Keenleyside & Richard Moon | Primeval | Thursday 29 July – Sunday 8 August 2021

 

CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is delighted to introduce Simon Keenleyside and Richard Moon in ‘Primeval’ at 28 Shelton St, Covent Garden, London. Combining the finely painted monochromatic figuration of Richard Moon with Keenleyside’s vividly fluorescent landscapes, the exhibition explores nostalgia, the mythological and the uncanny.  

Simon Keenleyside is known for his vibrantly incandescent landscapes that are both dreamlike and hallucinogenic. Returning to the same location repeatedly, Keenleyside embraces the familiar whilst searching for difference within it. He looks to uncover the strange and unfamiliar, navigating a course between the sublime and the uncanny, but also beauty. As the artist states:

“I want a sense of complicated beauty that is not just seductive or elegant but one that is fraught with anxiety and desires.”

 

Evoking mystery and wonderment by way of higher reality, Keenleyside paints topologies that are both physical places and psychical states.  

Richard Moon’s paintings explore nostalgia and its tendency to alter the factual recollection of memory—clouding it with selective interpretations and ultimately distortions of truth. Largely painted in the monochromatic hues of vintage photography (itself a subject and aid to nostalgia), Moon’s paintings evoke periods in history that in turn might suggest specific events.

Subjects include politically loaded flags such as the American Confederate flag; broken porcelain figures; hybrid creatures with human heads; and still lives with subtle but incongruous gothic motifs sewn into the tablecloth. In combination, Moon’s paintings weave their way through historical, mythological and political implications, questioning the very notion of truth and whether we can ever really be certain of a concrete, stable reality.

Together, Keenleyside and Moon invite us towards an unworldly territory that originates in reality, but which is sublimated through two very specific lenses. They are primal visions that confront us with otherness, timelessness and absence.