- Venue
- Nolia's Gallery
- Location
Within ‘Shine Through All the Spheres', Stephen Riley experiments and plays with material and matter. This body of recent paintings explore the notion of both limitation and liberation. All of these works employ the static symbol of a circle as a vessel for the abstract and figurative. His technique is both mediated and random, relying on the reaction of the materials to create a form of alchemical imagery. The tactile nature in many of his works erupts from the canvas in places and has an immediacy and sensuality in texture. Riley's paintings are hybrid and fecund, his use of a glowing lava stream of colour is intensely visually seductive. The paintings are reminiscent of landscapes of earthly, alien and even microbiological nature. There is a restlessness and vitality, to the process, he explores the subtleties of surface and depth, dripping, dragging and investigating, questioning and experimenting, exploring his own inner cosmology. Through exploiting the volatility of paint, his works are immediate, of the moment, a record of motion, colour poured onto canvas, to settle, congeal and react.
I entered the gallery on a bleak evening and was struck by the intensity of colours, abundant, vibrant and overblown. The paintings have a crystalline brilliance, a glow that suggests an opulence and mysticism. His spheres almost appear to float, the luminosity of the colours create an atmospheric sublime almost seeming to point towards the sky.
Riley's resolution to utilize the archetype of the circle suggests Mandalas, the eastern symbol employed as kind of self-protection intended to guard against the outside world from entering into the inner psychic space. The magic circle as a charm is an archaic emblem still found in folklore used as a means of objectification of unconscious images. Riley places self-imposed boundaries through his choice of format, a square constraining a circle. This has parallels with Jungian theory the square representational of earth and the circle is attributed to the spirit -a union of opposites. This powerful minimal geometry acts as his personal gateway.
Predominately, Riley's paintings are abstract, but within the body of work he has included imagery, figurative and representational, which read as ciphers, they subvert and make one question their significance but still form part of the solution to a strategy for which the outcomes are unpredictable. He employs an almost divinatory process which allows the circle to be reinvented again and again.
Melody Austin
Director of The Art Works Studios and Gallery
Poole
