Rex Southwick’s highly saturated paintings verge on the self-referential: they are concerned with the often gritty process of creating something deemed beautiful. Southwick depicts luxury domestic spaces in different stages of construction, challenging the stream of idealised images that flood our digital feeds. His work is a celebration of paint over pixel; canvas over screen.
Read MoreRex Southwick's paintings toil with the exploration of interactions with domestic spaces in relation to ownership and aspiration, working from images sourced from building contractors and construction site visits. His highly saturated and bold large scale paintings invite you to view these idealised domestic environments at an incomplete and less imposing state. The addition of labourers in his works introduces a narrative, exploring how we view and interact with environments and introducing notions of hierarchy and ownership.
His work creates a bridge between the seemingly endless stream of idealised domestic environments found on digital platforms, and the reality of these places. Paintings that remodel digital ostentation into physical images which remove concerns of ownership and status and present them in a physical form, interacting within the confines of pictorial space whilst exploiting the inherent qualities of paint.
