It’s not typical to encounter in a contemporary art gallery the degree of dreamy, virtuoso beauty seen in British artist Stephen Thorpe’s paintings, which feel more like historic work you’d see in European art museums.
Thorpe’s exquisite solo exhibition at Wolfgang Gallery, “Who Looks Outside, Dreams; Who Looks Inside, Awakes,” takes its title and cue from psychoanalyst Carl Jung, in envisioning nature as a portal to higher consciousness.
Thorpe’s oil paintings on canvas and denim are contemplative and reserved but then — without warning — turn a corner into ecstatic. His scenes of a stylized nature and outrageously rich color palette reveal layers of meaning and technique the longer you survey them.
In his first Atlanta exhibition, Thorpe debuts delicate pastel drawings and miniature Asian-inspired screens along with his singular “room” paintings he can’t paint fast enough to keep up with demand.
A former Atlanta resident who fairly recently decamped to Manhattan, the peripatetic Thorpe draws deeply from his years living in Hong Kong in a solo show that blends Asian influences and inspiration from his years in Georgia.
The waterfowl and songbirds he paints in his otherworldly landscapes are native to Georgia, and Thorpe’s waterfalls, an artist statement notes, were also inspired by the state’s abundant natural wonders.
In two almost mirror image paintings that face each other on one gallery wall, “Sacred Sentinel” and “Soul Guardian,” majestic blue herons fly through a landscape of waterfalls that cascade in perpetual crescendo into a lake surrounded by a downy green meadow and cantaloupe-colored sky. That Edenic tableau in each painting has the symmetry and elegance of an Art Nouveau glade and the electric skies and pulsating colors of Maxfield Parrish.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
And then, like a boom mic intruding into a film’s shot, cast your eyes to the base of those paradisiacal landscapes where nature is abruptly sealed off with decorative wood molding and an Oriental carpet. Those details of the human-made world puncture his vision of natural bounty. This and other gestures wrest us out of his paintings’ narcotic grip.
In a number of room paintings on view, Thorpe returns to a favorite theme: the corners of rooms where collisions of the ostensibly real and the gloriously fake transpire. Those trompe l’oeil rooms feature plain painted walls adjoining other walls that are more like windows, offering complex, delightful views of birds and mountains, lakes and forests. Those natural tableaux are so idealized, you think of sensuous ukiyo-e landscape paintings, where birds soar over fields of upturned lilies and trees are eternally festooned with gumdrop pink blossoms, along with the scientific-meets-romantic bird portraits created by John James Audubon. The floors in those room paintings are covered with ornate rugs as alive with nature and fantastic creatures as the painting-within-a-painting in Thorpe’s room.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
In these enchanted rooms the border between the built world and paradise is permeable.
In his painting “Veiled Ridges of Transformation,” in oil on denim, a wood duck stands in front of a Salvador Dali dreamwork rock formation and another bird hops out of that landscape to plunk its webbed feet onto the room’s rug like a time traveler that has slipped through the space-time continuum.
Thorpe’s paintings are distinctly realist but flocked with something fantastical, almost psychedelic. Change position in the gallery, or watch sunlight filter in through a window, and the paintings shape shift. Like the rainbow colors that emerge when an oil slick is hit by sunlight, Thorpe’s paintings can change from matte to iridescent. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the artist has cited the trippy color fields of Mark Rothko as an influence.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Thorpe lacquers oil paint onto many of his canvases like cake batter. It oozes and flows like lava, wrapping around the sides of his paintings. In this and other ways, Thorpe is drawing attention to the various layers of deceit and show biz in painting.
At every turn, Thorpe balances exquisite, seductive technique with a reminder that there is a wizard behind the curtain, lifting it so we can take a look.
ART REVIEW
“Stephen Thorpe: Who Looks Outside, Dreams; Who Looks Inside, Awakens”
Through May 18 at Wolfgang Gallery. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Free. 1240 Old Chattahoochee Ave. NW, Suite H, Atlanta. 404-549-3297, wolfganggallery.com.
Bottom line: Sumptuous, beautiful work that taps into a universal fascination with nature alongside a sophisticated laying bare of the painter’s role in creation.
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