Artists: Simon Linington - Afonso Rocha

"When you grow up by the sea, you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on Earth the waves might bring - and where the sea might deposit you - until one day you know you have lived between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure." - Andrew O'Hagan

Afonso Rocha and Simon Linington have both left the seafront towns where they grew up. Rocha grew up on the coast of northern Portugal and Linington on the Isle of Wight. In their artistic practices, they are united in negotiating an ongoing, lingering question: what do you do when home is somewhere you have left, and belonging is something you can not quite locate anywhere?

This enquiry is quite literal in Linington's work. An array of slender glass rods, each sealed and filled with pigments, mixed by Linington and inspired by the many different hues of sand found at Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight. The wall-mounted tubes are held in vertical formation, with the cool exactitude of a scientific study. Elegant and slightly uncanny, the forms have something that has been extracted from a landscape and carefully preserved. Sand, of course, is the slow product of stone worn by water over millennia. It represents the substance that more than any other defines the edge where land meets sea. Linington mixes his pigments by hand, building a colour field that captures differing hues of the Isle of Wight. The faded brightness of the British seaside, a once vivid place now melancholic and softened by sun and salt. His interest, he says, lies in the mirage of home and the shimmer of something just out of reach.

Rocha's paintings are sun-drenched and warm, populated with leisurely poolside figures. The scenes read, at first glance, like holiday postcards, set with a colour palette of lush greens and blue water. But look closer and something stranger is at work. In one painting, a naked woman sunbathes face-down while a ginger cat attends to itself nearby. A watchful woman, uneasy and out of register with the pleasure around her, looks on. In another, a sun-bleached chair sits empty at the poolside, a scarlet bikini bottom slung over one armrest, its absent owner palpable as a presence. Elsewhere, a figure drifts on an inflatable ring while a young boy stares open-mouthed at a naked woman poolside, capturing something of the slightly unhinged quality of childhood holidays. Rocha builds his compositions through collage-like logic. He draws from holiday photographs, magazine images, and figures assembled and placed against one another until certain combinations produce the desired tension. The background is usually set in his family home in northern Portugal, with its hedge and its pool backdrop, lit by the sun of Mediterranean summer. The background, however, arrives last and is painted from memory.

When the Land Meets the Sea proposes that the seafront is a psychological state of mind. The sea draws the eye to an infinite edge, the point beyond which representation gives way to feeling, to a certain kind of yearning. Rocha and Linington make visible how a place persists within you, continuing to shape and inform you, even as it evolves into something you no longer entirely recognise. What emerges is a sustained, unresolved dwelling in ambivalence, and an honest, ongoing dialogue to the experience of belonging in the present tense.

Text written by Sofia Hallstrom