Louis Wootton-Davies

Upon first entering the exhibition, the viewer will be immediately struck by the incredibly intense, dark colour palette of Wootton-Davies’ paintings. Wootton-Davies’ compositions are suffused with black, a deep, impenetrable black that lays over each composition like a blanket, covering over, suffocating and absorbing any and all peripheral visual detail. As such, Wootton-Davies depicts the urban landscape not just at night, but totally obliterated by night. The wan, deserted objects in the foreground of each painting appear as if out of a void, or a black hole, their shape and contours picked out and delineated by the sterile, and unavoidably voyeuristic, light of a cheap camera flash. Here, Wootton-Davies configures the British landscape as abandoned, derelict, bordering on apocalyptic. Each space depicted is a lonely, isolated space, swallowed in night, in which only the subtlest traces of humanity can be discerned. Wootton-Davies draws his subject matter directly from images taken during return trips to his hometown. Working at night, Wootton-Davies documents the landmarks and places that shaped his upbringing and adolescence. As a result, the intensely personal scenes that make up the body of the exhibition join together to form an eerie inversion of the traditional family photo album. Whereas a family photo album captures fleeting moments in order to preserve their emotional timbre forever, ‘The Chippy’s Got Rid of Its Fruit Machine’ stages the uncanny experience of returning to those same places of childhood only to find them evacuated, vacant and coldly inhospitable. Throughout the show, one object asserts its presence more pervasively and more troublingly than any other. Depicted waving atop a pole or stretched limply in front of the facade of a darkened house, the St. George’s flag irreversibly shifts the meaning of the entire series. Scenes that were previously quietly eerie are suddenly imbued with a direct sense of visceral, simmering tension. Here, Wootton-Davies configures the flag as a sort of ghost, or phantom. As its partially translucent form looms out of the dark, Wootton-Davies literalises the symbol’s capacity to haunt neighbourhoods and their residents with the latent threat of hostility and violence. Words by Jamie Hope