Over the last two decades Charles Avery has devoted himself to The Islanders, an epic project that describes the inhabitants, topography, and culture of an imaginary island, through drawings, writings, and sculptural objects.
Now Avery reveals, for the first time, an entirely new project entitled The Eidolorama. Here the sprawling complexity that characterises The Islanders is replaced by a radical economy of means.
Avery describes the paintings that comprise The Eidolorama as, "a community of simple pictorial forms that comply and respond to the quadrilinear order of the rectangles that contain them”. They have no prescribed orientation, or location. Together they exist as complex and charismatic structures which Avery calls assemblies - "their genealogy explicitly legible throughout their painted surface. And while the paintings present as closed systems of purely abstract shapes, they also suggest worldly associations to apparently recognisable forms, such as keyholes, pills, corporate logos, angels, planets, cells and sausages".
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:
“I regard these works as self-evident. This idea 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.”
