ALFIE CAINE

For British painter Alfie Caine, space is both his subject and his language - something to be lived in, designed, and imagined. Trained in architecture before turning to painting, Caine constructs imagined interiors and landscapes that hover between memory and invention. His rooms and vistas are familiar yet impossible: domestic scenes that obey their own geometry, built from longing.

Rivers and Rooftops takes its title from the two most striking features of Rye, the small East Sussex town where the artist lives and works - the rivers that cut through its marshlands, and the rooftops that tumble down from its hilltop. Each painting in the exhibition traces a different viewpoint within this geography: the sloping streets of the town seen from above, or the still water glimpsed while walking his dog along the path to the studio. The result is less a topographical portrait than a mapping of perception - an ensemble of viewpoints that carries the viewer through light, air, and recollection.

Colour plays a central role in sustaining this tension between the real and the imagined. Walls are painted in pinks, greens, and blues that feel both nostalgic and hyperreal, as if lifted from an interior design magazine or an advertising poster from the 1980s. These hues, calibrated rather than mimetic, guide the viewer’s emotional response.

“I follow my instinct,” he notes, “to reach the feeling that the scene needs.” That instinct for composition owes as much to design and graphic art as to the Renaissance painting he often studies. In his works, Caine borrows the early Renaissance fascination with perspective and framing devices. Caine’s rooms, like Piero della Francesca’s ideal architectures, follow their own internal logic. Their calm is never airless. Soft brushwork, heightened colour, and the cameo of a dog keep the atmosphere alive, suggesting a presence just beyond the frame.

If architecture builds the real, Caine’s painting builds the wished-for. His houses are refuges from pace and noise, spaces of introspection. Rivers and Rooftops invites viewers to wander through these imagined spaces - to drift, as Caine does, between the tangible and the imagined, along rivers that wind past rooftops, where reality gives way to reverie.