LONDON.- Continuum sees Marco and Jacob Crivello come together for the first time as father and son, presenting individual works alongside collaborative pieces to showcase their shared affinity for the creation of immersive, atmospheric worlds.

The show acts as a part-retrospective for Marco, exhibiting his final seascape paintings, alongside exciting new works, including sculpture and photography that continue to explore themes of improvisation, materiality and process. For Jacob, this will be his first major show as an increasingly sought-after, emerging artist as he examines the possibility that beauty can be found within the reinvention of the previously used.

A well-established artist Marco Crivello’s works sit between representation and abstraction as he creates atmospheric worlds with his signature use of Dutch gold leaf buried within the geology of the glazed surface. Working mainly in oils yet finding constant inspiration through the unforeseen fusion of different media such as cellulose spray paint, salt, acrylics and Dutch gold leaf he has become as Julian Bell describes him, a “masterly technician”.

An important aspect of Crivello’s painting is the improvised process involved. He comments “moment by moment, it is almost impossible not to be seduced by past solutions, a vast reservoir of visual memory, learnt gestures and instinctive tendencies, reinforced through habitual usage. What remains alive for me as a creative question, are those moments of surrendered intention when conscious doing is replaced by an unfolding in which one is a witness to another order that escapes our understanding”.

His elemental and arresting work incorporates layering and over lapping of elements and a porous geology of paint. His technical ingenuity enables him to be both establishing paint as elemental and at the same time introducing a composition which comments on landscape – the work exists both as product of and in connection with our material world of land, sea and weather.

Forging his own path in the artistic world, Jacob Crivello talents embrace a different medium. His sculptural works attempt to evoke feeling through re-imagined micro-landscapes where contemporary figures are dwarfed by landscapes of craggy moss-covered rocks, sandy cliff edges, watery gulleys, sparse vegetation and tiny alpine flowers.

In a world geared towards supersizing, Jacob creates his poetic microworlds using reverse shift in scale, focusing our attention on freeze-frame dramas unfolding to a natural world of compressed delicacy. Couples in quiet dialogue and individuals sitting alone in contemplative, often melancholic poses, resonate with emotional force and feel curiously reminiscent of the well-known Victorian watercolourists and poets.

Positioned under glass domes, these landscapes are micro-worlds we can view from a reassuringly safe distance indicative of curiosities in a 19th century museum collection; yet at the same time Crivello ask us to consider them in the context of a haunting reminder of a world depleted in natural resources through climate change. With a particular focus on detail, Jacob creates suggestions of interior dramas somewhere between dream and reality, immersed in stillness.

He comments “In my most recent series “The Beauty Within” I have been exploring the possibilities of using old vintage materials such as rusty tobacco tins and reinventing them to give them a new lease of life. In an age of unnecessary waste, technological obsession and feverish updating, I believe that it is always worth reminding ourselves that beauty can be found within the reinvention and repurposing of the old and previously used.”