20 April – 16 June 2013
Taking its title from critic John Ruskin’s third volume of Modern Painters Thomas’ latest series of paintings linger on the Romantic sublime and quote from a historical obsession with the End of the World. Whilst these works reference the essence of the sublime they also suggest that perhaps modern Man has conquered all of nature apart from his own. With a Utopian quest fueled by a para-religious pursuit of technological advancement perhaps it is the machines that will win.
Thomas continues to explore the fictions man has created in order to deal with his existential predicament and the attempt to fill, as Jung described it, ‘the God-shaped hole’. These timeless landscapes are silent and menacing with mysterious crystalline growths. Devoid of human presence yet witnessed by surveillance cameras, the only company in this desolation is a space ship or homing beacon. The glitches in the representation of the skies seem to betray the unreliability of reality. Located simultaneously between Romanticism and science fiction Thomas’ paintings describe unstable worlds that fuse past, present and future.
Have a read of our interview with Lex Thomas here.