Alexander Raymond

Alexander Raymond’s paintings are poised between empathetic sensitivity and feel-good kitschiness. This is where the explicitly illustrative and the painterly subject meet. For him, they are like stage-sets, landscape backdrops with theatrical lighting and unnaturally radiant colours. What they convey to the viewer is not just the conventional visualisation of the allures of mass tourism, but also the painter’s feel for landscape, borne of his own individual aesthetic. Raymond’s paintings are densely atmospheric works which generate an ambivalent tension in the viewer and at the same time convey impenetrable depth. The supposedly familiar and habitual here conceal something uncanny; hence the emergence of shadowy figures and objects like reflections cut adrift.