Artist: Iain Faulkner

Iain Faulkner’s new suite of paintings explores the urban landscape of the contemporary city. Essentially topographic, these images delineate massed and multifarious assemblies of architectural form. Seen from afar, from an elevated viewpoint, his birds-eye views articulate the vast scope and scale of the meta-city, Los Angeles.

Faulkner is a master of aerial perspective. That is, his technique registers the effects of atmosphere and distance to emphasise the spatial depth of his subject. As forms recede into the background they are lighter, outline and detail blurs, contrasts reduce and there is a marked tonal shift to the blue end of the spectrum, although this is often mitigated by the throbbing pinks and yellows of sunset Californian skies. The painter captures the dusty haze and suffused light of the giant, sprawling metropolis.

In these forensic surveys of spatial and formal complexity, everything is in its place; all is subject to the rational scrutiny of the artist’s eye. The painter makes a painstaking assessment and reckoning of each pictorial element to form a coherent whole. He takes pleasure in the deployment of a plethora of multi-coloured geometric shapes that define the planes of buildings, occasionally interspersed with interstitial passages of trees and foliage, at odds with the unrelenting prescience of the built environment.

It is worth noting that the painter's viewpoint is from the Hollywood Hills, elevated and apart from the city. There are no people in sight, indeed the scale precludes seeing them. This subject is overwhelming, a behemoth, a machine for living, indifferent to its inhabitants and seemingly self-perpetuating. Seen from outside it is revealed as awesome - stretching to the horizon - a giant, faceted maze of possible outcomes and destinations, a modern-day Labyrinth, that, however, lacks a centre, but contains its own multitude of unique and unknowable risks and rewards.