BWG Gallery presents Somewhere Near Perception an exhibition of Joe Grieve's most recent series of paintings.

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Continuously drawn to Landscape Painting, Grieve finds it has the potential to embody one's deepest sensory experiences of nature. He has been interested in the question of what makes something holy, having recognised his closest experience to the concept of holiness, the idea of religious experience, is within nature. Embracing, capturing and projecting this feeling has become the starting point for a lot of Grieve's work:

 

“I paint as though I’m walking through the woods, stumbling across the canvas, making marks as I go.  I like the notion of paradise, but I feel it lies just beyond the reach of my fingertips; the enigmatic places that I paint are an attempt to express this intangible feeling.”

 

Through heavy layering and texture, Grieve gives his vistas a multisensory quality. Fundamental to his practice, Grieve aspires to create paintings that evoke these memories of experiencing nature. In the pieces entitled Valley of the Wind, Primal & Emerging from the East natural phenomena reach from the landscapes and envelop us in the conditions shaping their natural beauty. The sun blinds your eyes, the rushing wind steals your breath and fills your ears, the swirling blizzard bites at your skin and scents of the undergrowth viscerally transport you to the past.

 

Embracing the visual sensory experience, Grieve has incorporated actual sound and smell; working with artist and composer John Collet on an ambient, naturalistic soundscape. And, using oils, filling the space with rich, immersive scents of the wilderness. Similar to how a church might use incense to amplify the aura of its space, this exhibition's enhancements amplify our viewers experience and make the memory evocation of Grieve’s paintings more palpable.

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Grieve's Landscapes are an amalgamation of real and imagined places. The result oscillating between abstraction and representation – befuddlingly realised in the work entitled Meander, where a seemingly familiar flat British countryside horizon opens into an increasingly surreal web of fields and boundaries. The ambiguity of how the layers interact, what recedes and what overlaps, flouts traditional norms of perspective. Intending for his abstraction to allow viewers familiar interpretations of place, becoming portals to personal memories and experiences of the natural world.