Oil on canvas.
This painting is a triptych.
“In my work Auguries of Exit, I imagine a decadent banquet in a world already ended, a slow-motion apocalypse disguised by excess, fantasy, and spectacle. Auguries of Exit arose out of Auguries of Innocence. William Blake envisioned a world where the infinite could be seen in the ordinary, where nature’s abundance reflected a cosmic order. This world was eternal and regenerative. Today, such cycles are no longer guaranteed; the natural world no longer seems to hold the promise of endless returns. Instead, humanity conducts a mass taxidermy of what once appeared immutable – tempos of land, ocean, sky, all pointing toward some end.
Blake’s Innocence has given way to the unquiet, where the future feels lost, quivering between decay and disappearance. My vandalised Blakean verse: “To see a world in a grain of plastic, and a heaven in a wild inferno, hold smartphone in the palm of your hand, and exit in an hour” marks this shift: a world of endless returns at a misstep with a synthetic present exhausted by technology and crises.
Within this theme of a slow-burning mundane exit, my paintings navigate between humour and horror. The excess of a modern-day Cockaigne turns into a kind of eulogic rot, a covert funeral rite playing out in isolated figures and sickly textures. I am interested in a visual language that moves between raw emotion and absurdity, realism and deconstruction”.
