Wild World

Wild World was a solo exhibition at Peter Zimmermann Gallery, Mannheim, Germany.

Fairnington's new series of paintings, Roots are intensely detailed with an obsessive description of varied surfaces that fills the picture plane, the brushwork generates a restless energy and anxiety; nature in motion, unfixed and ungraspable, at a point of transformation. There is a convergence of nature abandoned, unleashed and nature controlled, the cultivating desires of horticulture, the eccentricities of topiary. But, at the heart of these paintings lies an animation which embodies the transition from one thing to another. Sourced from multiple photographs, collaged to build imagined structures and referencing the histories of landscape and still-life painting they subvert their own realism; demanding to be believed they none the less slowly reveal their fictions.

A self-conscious blending of observation and imagination means that while the landscapes here are visibly English the plants emerging from these growing structures come from many places and sources, from the glasshouses of Kew, 17th c flower paintings and museum collections across the country.

The underworld of nature, the generative power of plants and creatures was first explored in the 17th c. Sottobosco (meaning the undergrowth) paintings of Otto Marseus van Scrieck and Rachel Ruysch. My paintings describe the cycle of life, death and decay, putrefaction and re-birth, the blasted oaks of the past, they also enjoy the voracious fecundity of nature in flux; roots, tendrils, leaves and flowers express a vital energy and grow in defiance of the environment that surrounds them. Belief in spontaneous generation is merged with folklore, an emotional imagining of the landscape rather than a scientific one. The paintings conjure legends of The Green Man, guardian of the forest and the Burryman, both enveloped in foliage and representing regeneration.

• https://galerie-zimmermann.de/