Leisure Landscapes |

In the Leisure Suite the environment is experienced as a tourist would: filled with other seekers of beauty. Figures populate the landscape and the viewer is absorbed among the ordinary people celebrating the democratization of holidaying. Then on a closer look, tensions emerge between relaxation and voyeurism, between the private and the public, and between nature and its expenditure.

This project has paintings and prints that explore leisure. The works are landscapes populated by figures on holiday. The images have mostly been constructed from photographs and drawings that have allowed otherwise mundane moments to be charged with an additional insight. Landscapes have become more complex as the beauty of nature is crowded together with nostalgia for a lost past, exhibitionism, escape, freedom and consumption.

Pontresina, above, best illustrates the role of “looking” in the suite. It is a modern urban-scape, even mundane. Four girls are swimming in the distance, but the moment is broken by a lone figure in the carpark. His singular presence gives voice to the voyeur he becomes a disquieting other, yet the vantage point of the painting adds an additional layer as the audience in front of the piece becomes an additional and uncomfortable on-looker.

In Potsdam and Scopelli (top) the viewer is invited to join the scene as people enjoy the sun, grass, and water. Potsdam makes allusions to Manet’s: “Luncheon on the Grass” the figures ever-so-slightly awkwardly sized, creating a implicit unease for the viewer particularly when coupled with the depiction of private moments on display, In other works further along on the site a dissonant note more quickly jars the idyllic. In “Long beach” a figure leaps off the dunes, a confusing moment in the “Wedding” and “Koufinisi” the scene requires the audience to attend to more than just a scene of a holiday and to see beyond a singular reading of the works. The art plays with the absurdity of leisure most specifically in the “Swans” and it’s companion etching “Flamingoes”