CALDERA | Luke Elwes

Luke Elwes' third solo exhibition with Frestonian Gallery - 'Caldera' - is a vivid evocation of an extraordinary journey by the artist through the Puna de Atacama - an unbounded high-altitude wilderness straddling Chile, Bolivia and north-west Argentina. This is not a living space, containing almost no roads or inhabitants, but an otherworldly realm stretching over vast distances and empty horizons with silent landscapes that range from burnt red and orange valleys to black and white plateaus, from shimmering salt pans and mountain passes ringed with volcanic cones and craters to wind blasted tracts composed of 400-million-year-old sandstone outcrops and ghostly fields of white pumice carpeted with shifting dunes of ash and mineral dust. The drawings Elwes made on site, incorporating the mineral dust of the desert, became a starting point for the resulting sequence of fifteen large-scale paintings. In response to those first raw impressions washes of pigment were laid down and reworked without correction, in a process more closely attuned to the large works on paper of recent years than the more meditative recollections on canvas which shaped his earlier bodies of work on canvas. The vivid immediacy of these new images nevertheless carries echoes of other times and places for the artist, from the early work in Australia, as well as the Tibetan Plateau and the African desert. Here is a world of deeply layered time experienced through a fleeting presence, one that leaves only the faintest trace on a space of geological upheaval in which a much older story of rock formation, eruption and seismic movement continues to unfold; a narrative that exists beyond our collective memory and comprehension.