Luke King-Salter
Theraps Avagthee, First Series
The biblical themes of these paintings reflect their basis in the visionary universe of artists like Blake and Palmer, and, ultimately, the surreal landscapes of medieval biblical illustration.
They represent these themes abstractly, but they do contain landscapes and figures. Noli me tangere, the ‘don’t touch me’ scene in which Mary Magdalene first encounters the resurrected Jesus and mistakes him for a gardener, depicts Mary reaching up towards a tense rectilinear Christ complete with customary hoe. Fuga—Flumen places the traditional ‘rest on the flight into Egypt’ in a sweeping landscape with a river. And the Via Crucis is a more heavily abstracted scene of Christ bearing the cross.
All are watercolour and gouache on paper, 5 x 7 inches. Click here for pdf catalogue.
Stylistically, line is emphasised and colours are strictly contained, but free play is given to the irregular distribution of the watercolour paint. This results in a highly detailed but mottled finish, straddling the line between a sketch and a finished painting.
The pictures are also stylistically rooted in a fascination with Vorticism, the short-lived modernist movement that fostered the first British experiments in abstract art. Vorticism was ostensibly a reaction against dreamy romanticism. And yet the characteristic ‘machine’ imagery of Vorticism is something I take to be incidental. The essence of it is not mechanical at all: it was simply a modern manifestation of the same old organic twisting and twirling convoluted life and energy that goes all the way back to the ancient Celts. Indeed, I think the bizarre shapes and linear intensity of Vorticist designs, as well as their hyper-saturated but often mixed and earthy colours, place them squarely within the visionary tradition in British art. This is an insight that I have tried to make fruitful in Theraps Avagthee.
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