What is it to confess? A secret, hidden beneath the public face, is surrendered to view. In this collection, Scott Breton turns to experiences connected to shame and pain, to the eternal struggle between despair and the vital lust for life. The results are dreamscapes. Or perhaps nightmares, with some containing confronting surreal imagery. Non-verbal, felt senses of the human condition, terrifying and beautiful, become a seductive black ocean, a spreading patch of blood, and the caress of golden light. Breton has made pictures of a mental jumble of conflicting forces shaping our world, from Palaeolithic cave painting, to today’s mental health crisis, to contemplations of artificial intelligence, to the practises of Sufi mystics. In a formal sense, the life drawings included in this show are connected to the paintings by an investigation of the calligraphic, painterly mark, which has the capacity to make tangible the secret, kinetic themes that can be felt in the figure, and in the mark-making hand.
Image: Baptism by Space 64 x 121cm, oil on board
