Ends Sunday 29 May 2016

This contemporary show, close to Silicon Roundabout. Takes a studied interested in the relationship that games designers have to painting. Particularly looking to Francis Bacon for visceral inspiration in depicting cadavers.

Paul Savage echos Picasso’s observation that “Through art we express our conception of what nature is not”. Yet it is through drawing a parallels between video games, painting and Antonin Artaud concept of the theatre and its double that Savage realises the maximum expression and the imagistic limits of the human body.

Savage graduated from the Royal College of Art MA Painting in 2007, pursuing an investigation of oil paint through contrasting transparency, fluidity and erosion with heavily mediated images .

Producing visceral and seductive surfaces, he depicts the human form, distorted, emerging from artificial environments influenced by a fascination with graphic computer game imagery. With the immediacy of digitally constructed spaces seen in 3D stills.

(Intersections, above, contains an earlier painting  having been cut up and turned into a college creates a sense of suspense and visual puzzle).

He concerns himself with depicting the variables of reality by fusing the artificiality of art, contemporary culture, found photographs and imaginary landscapes.

Colouristic density, luminescence and distinct iconography, are juxtaposed with 20th Century history, modern and postmodern structures from various cultures of the early 21st century. In the form of searched imagery sourced from newspapers, magazines and from artificial environments.

Transitory, and The Shadow of Meaning 2013, are part of a series where concrete imagery contrasted in a golden ratio with, fluid painting reminiscent of video games.

Highlights of the show include; Robert Duvall, in the film The Eagle has Landed, reflects Savages aesthetics meditations, the Egyptian head 1st Cent Ad — fusing the ancient with the most current developments.

(Lucian Freud thought that nothing had ever bested Egyptian portraiture.)

Intersection 2011–16 is an empty room, referencing the architectural spaces in video games. Using it as an opportunity to mix different painting languages and to collage older paintings into the composition. Placing this large painting at the back, creates a doubling effect of a room within a room.

Ends Sunday 29 May

Opening Times

Thursday to sunday 12 noon to 6 pm — or by appointment

Studio 1.1

57a Redchurch Street

Shoreditch

London E2 7DJ