Gareth Edwards RWA

Frequencies
Oil on Canvas
183 x 152 cm

Gareth Edward's abstract paintings possess an emotional intelligence that compels us to enter into their intimate narratives.

Dynamic and tender, condensed yet complex, the work is shot through with an intensity of being that moves you, stills the heart and draws you back again and again.

The Poetic With his love of tone, texture and rhythm Gareth Edwards has conjured up a sublime painted landscape - an arresting and sensuous poetic. Within landscapes and mindscapes he offers us caught moments, sometimes personal, often epic. But no matter the scale or intent, every painting has an immediacy that insists upon our engagement so that we cannot be anything but complicit.

We take possession of these paintings. As with exceptional poetry, Gareth Edwards brings a fresh and illumintaing take on the world around and within us. Even though we connect with what we are looking at and into.

Here the revelation from image and language is reminiscent of scenes encountered in such beautifully crafted films such as those made by Krzysztof Kieslowski or Ingmar Bergman.

Desire Management Desire is the driving force, the process and the realisation to Gareth Edward's work. Desire comes in many guises whether it be for freedom, romance, the father, knowledge, sex... These paintings exude their own impulse. They are full-on. Life is HERE - intense, difficult, touching, desolate but always meaningful. Between the wanting and the getting, the departure and the arrival lies Edwards' fascination with the journey when he is moving from and to something desirable but not yet found, as we find with the title for this exhibition: freedom from freedom to.

Passionate For the first time, with this new body of work, Edwards has made his own paint using pigments from an ochre quarry in Rousillon: bitumen, negre judee, terre ombre, mars noir (also taken as a title), ochre jaune and raw sienna. The result of this personal alchemy is stunning. The colours have an energy and depth to them that embraces their subject completely. To see Edwards at work is to witness a force of nature. Once he has mixed the colour he applies it immediately, covering himself and his studio in paint, caught up utterly in the passionate moment of creation. This is something very physical and high risk. At times he has used a whole tube of paint in just one application. He is technically skilled and his style compliments and enhances the subject of the painting. Sometimes the paint is so thick it becomes sculptural, while other times layers are removed again and again almost back to bare canvas.

Transit(ional) Colours for Gareth Edwards are frequently shadowy, shifting and fluid. In the elemental paintings the seasons are transitional. Brooding Autumns vie with Eliotesque springs - nothing is quite what it might at first appear. Edges blur. Rifts appear. Weather is ever changing, a tempo particuarly of the climate in far west Cornwall where Edwards now lives. In the emotional paintings too there is a similar feel, a personal weather, a coming together and a pulling apart, a rising and a falling and the reassessment of relationships punctuated by brief moments of clarity and compromise. Edwards himself is in transit. And whilst his work, like that of all great painters, has a distinctive touch, he is constantly evolving and questing. You cannot pin Edwards down. He is a mover embracing new experiences, places and influences. Indeed with this new show Edwards has paintings inspired by visits to Mallorca and Southern France where the colours and style contrast to that of the Cornish-scapes.

Frontiers Many of the paintings have a point of confrontation within them. This is often symbolised by a physical boudary line whether it shows conflicting emotions or the moment at which feelings meet, or the juncture at which sea becomes land, or land becomes sky but can also blend into one hybrid element like snowseas or waterskies. Edwards also enjoys playing with juxtapostition and can produce beautiful pain, isloated intimacy and lost discoveries. When a painting has two distinct sides the dividing line is often off kilter to highlight a sense tension. These frontiers for Edwards are tipping points. Divisions and collisions within a whole.

Refrains Like music, Edwards uses recurring themes and refrains in his work set along side the new experiences and places he wants to explore. Text is used directly in some paintings, particularly extracts from poems. But often words are obscured, spoiled or run together so they metamorphosise into something other - a wordfield perhaps. A repeated image that slips into many of the paintings, often as an architectural line drawing, is the modernist room and/or building with its minimalist, clean, clearly defined lines. Edwards empathises with the optimism of modernism that was never quite achieved in reality but which had so much potential. This image is used from painting to painting but can also be seen as a bed, a white room, a void, a sanctuary and a confinement. A new departure, mirroring the theme of freedom from the show's title, is the appearance, albeit slight, of birds. Another is the circle in contrast to the proliferation of rectalinear shapes. With the circle comes a sense of being caught up in the eternal dance of life.

Light Light for Edwards is a guiding force in itself; in a world he believes to be secular. Set against much of the darker, transitional touches - sometimes they flood in to fill a whole painting, but mostly they are subtle caresses, still points, rests in the music. Here light is hope and what can be possible. Again, the skill comes from the mixing of these colours, the layering and the glazing. From the light comes a transparency, vibrancy and a clarity of vision, but one that is always hard found and hard fought.

Forward After we have finished our time together in the studio looking at each painting and talking about his art, his life, Edwards shows me a work in progress. It is a sequence of photographs of a diving platform in a lake with sketches and colour swatches. I am instantly excited anticipating the finished painting that these fragments will become. Edwards is looking forward, traveling hopefully and I just can't wait to see what happens next . . .

Amanda White is a writer. Her new collection of poetry 'Appearing Soon' will be published by Flambard Press.