We are delighted to be showing a selection of paintings by Alexander Massouras in September. His work is held in the following collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; British Museum, London; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; London School of Economics, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New York Public Library, New York; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Apertures is a series of paintings with windows picked out by bright light: the window admits the light, which in turn describes the form of the window. Apertures is the latest series in a sequence of projects that translate aspects of photography—such as camera flare, or the chromatic range of C-Type prints—back into painting. In chemical photography, the light makes the image; in Apertures, Massouras makes that process manual, using highlights as the principal method of painterly description.
Alberti once described painting as a window: 'I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish’, he wrote, ‘which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint'. Seeing 'what I want to paint' is an early and tantalising account of something between imagination and observation, full of circularity in describing the transition between one and the other. Where Massouras introduces blinds into the windows, that back-and-forth is given visual expression: sometimes it is the blind that is painted, sometimes the image through it. This process in turn gives form to the enduring conversation between abstraction and representation in contemporary painting. A painting is both a window and a wall, something looked through (for its image or its meaning) and looked at (as a flat surface covered with paint). The blinds and windows of Apertures express this dualism of surface and illusion.
To book an appointment please email admin@willoughbygerrish.com