Wild emotive landscapes meet trompe l’œil illusionism in new works by Alastair Gordon.
These new paintings began in the wilderness landscapes of the Scottish Outer Hebrides. I paint outdoors, often in remote and isolated parts of the Scottish landscape. These works began on the Isle of Harris, where I was Artist in Residence in 2024 for An Lanntair Gallery, culminating in my first solo museum exhibition at the gallery.
I then bring the paintings back to my London studio, where I paint the illusion of tape and wooden supports around the landscape, creating the impression of an artist’s mood board or a work in progress. I wanted to make work charged with greater emotion and feeling, and including a work painted in memory of my late father.
In a sense, I make paintings about painting: images that oscillate between artifice and artefact, between the landscape itself and the act of making an image of it.
My paintings refer to a form of trompe-l’œil illusionism that proliferated in seventeenth-century Northern Europe: the quodlibet, meaning ‘what you will’. In these paintings, an array of selected objects and fragments are arranged to appear as though they have been pinned or taped to a surface, creating a playful tension between the illusion of a temporary arrangement and the permanence of the painted image.