The reality of life is the subject of the works of Simon Edmondson. A dual reality: the knowable and the unknowable; or the close and the distant, which are somehow unified in a single personal vision.
His light-filled paintings operate as symbols for this relationship, where he creates atmospheres; tragic auroras of light cast over decaying everyday work places, hospitals, monuments, offices etc. Each canvas offers a new view of a changing world where the figures seem helplessly confronted by some unstoppable and elemental change.
These atmospheres take the viewer inside luminous architectural spaces where objects appear painted with a care and realism that contrasts with a painterly physical uncertainty. Foreground and background live together in tension, combining to form an unexplained experience of beauty and horror in one.
The backgrounds; often interior-like; where melancholy becomes extreme, either for their sense of destruction or their passive timelessness; are kept in perspective and distanced from the unquiet , occasional figurative personalities ; judges, politicians, cardinals, nurses etc.. Their presence; something between action and inaction, is charged with drama and dynamism.
The works of Edmondson move between the real and the unreal, the conscious and the unconscious, questioning both in collective historical memory. There is that which we feel we know and that which we cannot understand but whose presence we recognize. The union of these two contrasting elements is painted into one image appearing like a mirror of reality.
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