Tristram Lansdowne
Well Weather Window

In Tristram Lansdowne’s recent paintings, the reflective surfaces of late capitalism shimmer with the intensity of a desert mirage. The watercolours assembled in Well Weather Window staged a spellbinding panorama of glamour and decay. Framed within shallow depths, the discontents of Lansdowne’s recent spell as Roswell Artist-in-Residence flickered like the mundane wonders of latter-day cabinets of curiosity. Vitrine-like in construction, these works recall the marquetry illusions of Renaissance cabinets whose trick drawers and secret compartments sheltered rare marvels. Lansdowne, however, substitutes the doubtful flash of a flaming shot glass and the gleam of a discarded foil wrapper for the treasures once curated by connoisseurs.

Flexing the friction between a meticulous hyperrealism and a penchant for non-sequitur imagery, Lansdowne conjures Plato’s injunctions against the mimetic arts. Scattered across the ancient Greek philosopher’s dialogues are cautionary comments about technical innovations in the painting of his time that had heightened the medium’s powers of illusion. Lansdowne’s play on disarming naturalism and jarring montage rehearses storied debates set in motion by those admonitions, but he replaces the perspectival theatre backdrops of Plato’s time with the image layers of digital graphics editors such as Photoshop. The titular “window” of Lansdowne’s suite of paintings gestures towards this eclipse of the Albertian window by the electronic screen — an epochal shift echoed by the bevelled edges of some works.