What Burning Furniture in Surrey Has To Do With Surrealism

In my recent work, I’ve been looking at subjects such as the unconscious, the uncanny, fear, shock and all that edgy dark stuff anyone who keeps psychoanalysis and Cortázar's short stories on their bedside table is more than likely to be into. Curiously enough, what prompted me to move from sculptural collages back to figurative painting was far from a long abstract thought process but instead a very real event, precisely the rather curious sight of a sofa someone has set on fire that me and a friend encountered when hiking our way across Surrey.

It was quite an enchanting sight, and a very puzzling one that and left me with questions, an imprint of a feeling of strange emergency, unrest and curiosity. To be quite fair, the whole trip was rather interesting, it included for example a not-so-short episode of me getting quite lost in the semi-woods of Surrey with my phone battery dead, somewhere between Guildford and Farnham, trying to navigate my way along a path wonderfully named the Christmas Pie Trail and marked with little images of christmas pie. Real Hansel and Gretel like.

Breaking Noon I, oil on canvas, 3x3"

Anyway - the whole thing was quite an experience and thus ended up in an attempt to crystallize that strangeness, that curious sight of a bright fire in the middle of the day and in the middle of nowhere, along with its (excuse the fancy word) sublimity, in miniature (3x3") paintings, done in as much detail as possible. The paintings are not intended as symbolic, rather the simple sight (and the process of engaging with them, the fact that one notices the fire quite immediately but needs a longer while to figure out what is actually burning) should viscerally communicate the feelings of emergency, as a kind of mute/inarticulate scream, as the oddly tranquil sound of crackling fire in the middle of the field.

Additionally, there is the context of slight absurdity (also a genre of strangeness) resulting from the small size of the paintings. In that, they could perhaps be said to both comply with and slightly pervert and undermine the traditional comforting pleasant qualities of landscape painting. It falls into the uncanny valley, the way it looks familiar but not entirely so.

It is also an exploration of the hypnotic beauty of danger, of the pure irrationality of being drawn to something potentially lethal. Small and vibrant, the paintings are like little gems, beautiful, purely aesthetic objects, almost completely divorced from the reality behind them. Not even closely as gruesome as roadkill or car accidents, it may be that they draw your attention through a similar mechanism.

Breaking Noon II, oil on canvas, 3x3"