For the last two decades, Charles Avery has devoted himself to The Islanders, an epic project that described the inhabitants, topography, and culture of an imaginary island, through drawings, writings, and sculptural objects.
The Islanders continues, but alongside it Avery now unveils, for the first time, an entirely new project, titled The Eidolorama, in which The Islanders’ sprawling complexity is replaced by a radical economy of means.
The Eidolorama is a community of simple pictorial forms which combine to form more complex and charismatic structures which Avery describes as assemblies - their genealogy explicitly legible throughout their painted surface. The compositions comply with and respond to the quadrilinear order of the rectangles that contain them, thus the pictures are not windows into another world, they are ‘the world’.
The paintings that comprise The Eiodolarama have no prescribed orientation, or location. On one hand they present as a closed system of purely abstract shapes, and yet they also suggest worldly association to apparently recognisable forms, such as keyholes, pills, corporate logos, angels, planets, cells, sausages and aubergines.
Indeed these paintings deliberately assert a kind of double life, oscillating between the analytic and the synthetic, the sublime and the absurd. As Avery puts it: "This might usefully be explained by referring to them not as paintings, but expressions. These expressions collectively form their own argument, one that is never ending and always finished.”
