JAMES RIELLY

Titled ‘Stations on our journey’, this series of ten watercolours reflects on happiness, joy, and our ability to view the world through a hopeful lens. With Rielly’s signature blend of subtle wit and psychological depth, each work invites quiet contemplation on the emotional landscapes we pass through.

James Rielly’s work is characterised by the use of pastel tones and watery strokes, creating a sphere of tension and unease that reveal the artist’s intention to insinuate and leave the interpretation of his works open to the viewer. The scenes that appear in his work are tinged with humour and irony, mostly children’s portraits, based on stories and images culled from newspaper articles, old books, comics or magazines that he keeps for inspiration. He invites visitor to question things like the stages of transition to adulthood and the construction of an individual’s identity.

Those images, together with the artist’s imagination, are the starting point for Rielly’s works, whose characters often convey in their faces gestures of inquiry that evoke a hidden idea, a feeling, an event that cannot be explained or words that cannot be expressed.Their apparent simplicity is undermined by a sense of unease, a subversion of family roles, a hint of the dysfunctional through their representations of children behaving like adults and/or adults behaving like children.