Rosemary Valadon

The Wings of Eros

Opening Saturday 17 May 2008

The Wings of Eros: Desire Takes Flight!

In a lush new series of paintings Rosemary Valadon explores the human experience of desire and yearning for love. Based on the ancient myth of Psyche and Eros, Valadon explores the aching spaces between earth and heaven. Works such as The visitor 1 play with the tensions between our creatureliness and the impulse for flight and transformation. This is an evocation of primal longing that is starkly illuminated through these rich images of tantalising beauty.

Working with a deeply rich palette and a new freedom with the brush, Valadon uses the dramatic landscape of Hill End, perched between sky and mountains, to set out this dramatic series of events. In Towards dusk, the landscape itself becomes one of the characters that play out this ancient story of the flight of desire through the carnal realms of human wanting. She finds a world flooded with colour where magical things articulate a greater sense of self.

This series of works mark a sustained command of both portraiture and landscape that offer a range of moods from ethereal single studies such as  Psyche and Eros 1 to the ever-shifting drama of the land as in As dusk fell… she waited. This exhibition demonstrates Valadon’s confidence as a painter of flesh in the vulnerable realms of darkness and light.