SHOLTO BLISSETT

Comprising a series of fictional landscapes, the exhibition continues Blissett’s exploration of humanity’s relationship with nature. Drawing on traditions of landscape painting while incorporating elements of surrealism and magical realism, these imagined worlds resist fixed geography or chronology. Instead, they invite viewers to reconsider inherited ideas of nature, wilderness and perception.

At the centre of Orders of Magnitude is an investigation of scale and relational meaning. Objects, environments and human presence are understood not in isolation but through their proximity to one another. Meaning is generated through context: forms of different sizes are placed in relation and scale becomes a way of making sense of the world, where nothing can be fully understood alone.

Across the exhibition, compositions unfold through an ascending sense of scale, moving from close, tactile foregrounds of plant life to vast skies and cavernous spaces that evoke awe. This progression both situates and unsettles the viewer, offering moments of recognition alongside encounters with overwhelming magnitude.

Illusion plays a central role in this dynamic. Reflective pools of water suggest depth though shallow, while skies appear contained within their surfaces creating spaces that feel boundless yet physically impossible. Elsewhere, cave-like surrounds imply abyssal depth despite their enclosed nature. Darkness becomes both dense and expansive, drawing the viewer into a depth that cannot be visually confirmed. Across these moments, distinctions between surface and depth, solidity and immateriality are destabilised, prompting viewers to question how perception constructs meaning.

Blissett’s engagement with scale extends into the imagination. As forms within the paintings gain meaning through relation, so too do the images emerge from a wider inheritance of aesthetic, emotional and intellectual associations. Landscape is shaped not only by physical features but by accumulated histories of thought and feeling, ideas of beauty, tranquillity and wildness that frame how nature is seen.

These tensions between intimacy and vastness, knowledge and sensation, run throughout Orders of Magnitude. Through scale, illusion and imagination, the paintings articulate meaning as something produced through relationship and perception rather than fixed form.