LONDON.- Unit London is presenting Transitions, a new exhibition by Hastings-based artist Jake Wood-Evans. Following the success of his 2016 show Subjection & Discipline, which saw the artist create a body of portraiture work inspired by 18th century Masters including Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Henry Raeburn, Transitions sees a shift of focus towards landscape and abstraction.
Richly-coloured, light-imbued scenes characterise the work, in which seascapes and serene vistas appear as though through a veil or clouded glass. In one, a figure is suggested, glowing within a studio of silks and fabric; in another, a horse is suspended beneath a flood of luminosity. Leaving behind the subdued colours of previous collections, the canvases are splashed with vivid hues of gold, red, orange, turquoise and blue, whilst delicate brushwork is set alongside sweeping washes and horizontal scratches and scores.
Taking influence from the work of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer and George Stubbs, among others, Wood-Evans’s paintings retain recognisable elements that allude to the conventions of art history. Drawing on these masters’ legacies, his intention is to capture the essence of these historic works without replicating them, depicting familiar, yet obscured subject matter. Through first creating, then scrubbing away, reworking and removing sections of a scene, the artist reveals ghostly infrastructures that preserve the warmth and glow of the original painting.
Describing his work as ‘a process of conflict with the ambiguous space between representation and abstraction’, Wood-Evans resists the urge to provide easy readings or instantly accessible compositions. Transitions invites the viewer to pause and quietly contemplate a series of multi-layered paintings that denote a common visual language built through our shared history and consumption of art imagery.
Born in 1980 in Devon, Jake Wood-Evans graduated from Falmouth University with a BA Honours in Fine Art, where he won the accolade of ‘Free Range’ Most Promising Graduate. He was subsequently awarded a scholarship from the Royal Academy for classical study at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Based in Brighton for a number of years, he currently lives and works in Hastings. As well as exhibition at International art fairs, Jake Wood-Evans’ work has been shown at galleries in London and across the UK. Most recently, after a well-received 2016 solo exhibition, Subjection & Discipline with Unit London, Jake Wood-Evans was debuted as a feature artist in his first ever museum exhibition, REPORTRAIT, at the Nottingham Castle Museum.
