Pannonian Paintings

Randle White Fine Art, London

14th - 21st October 2024

Essay by Katherine Cole

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Pannonia sounds mythical, ancient. It was a province of the Roman Empire covering that area of Eastern Europe which is a melting pot of ethnicities and where borderlines have always fluctuated and blurred. It’s northern and eastern edges were bordered by the River Danube, with Dalmatia to the south, Noricum and upper Italy to the west. Today its shadowy footprint is overlaid by the Great Hungarian Plain as well as parts of Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. Much of this area is a flat and fertile basin bounded by mountains - Carpathians and Alps - rising up precipitately from the plain. From such a vantage point in the Vrsac mountains, in north-eastern Serbia, the artist William Foyle took a picture - a pool of pure, almost heavenly light, with the plain and the sky a misty blue at its edges.

William Foyle works with a single image of a landscape as the backdrop to several years’ worth of work. In the Pannonian Paintings the rich sunset colours of a photograph of Slemish mountain in County Antrim continue to infuse the series of ‘Images of Christ’, but with a conscious move towards the softer colour field of the light-filled Hungarian Plain; in contrast, in the ’Images of the Crucifixion’ all reds disappear and the blue-hued snapshot of the Hungarian Plain takes over. In both pictures the sun is at the centre, a light-filled vortex, with deeper colours towards the periphery.

But while the backdrop relates to landscapes travelled through and a family history explored, the real subject matter of all these paintings is unmistakably the figure of Christ. The artist spends time meditating before beginning on a canvas; pages of preparatory drawings exploring the imagery have imprinted the forms on his mind, but connecting to a true sense of the personhood of Jesus - finding a personal image of Christ - before embarking on the painting has become a kind of ritual akin to a liturgy. It is surely this practice that imbues the finished works with such a sense of spiritual serenity. The figure of Christ is not used didactically here, but adds a Christian inflection to the landscape of which He is an innate part; in some of the canvases His image almost disappears as if it were a trick of the light. These are religious paintings for a more secular age - giving a powerful sense of meaning to the world around us.

In ‘Images of Christ’ there are echoes of the Salvator Mundi. The half-length figure is isolated within a luminous landscape of colour, not quite face-on as Leonardo’s Christ is, no hand lifted in benediction. This Christ is more ambiguous, features blurred, gaze hidden, bereft of traditional attributes. His identity is instead sensed, almost viscerally, in the halo of light around his head and the pulsating red of the blood of humanity and of the Passion. Earlier works in this series employ a more defined outline - a broken line of white paint, marks made with fingers, lines gouged in the paint with a palette knife - rendering the substance of the figures within less tangible, almost ethereal; the halo effect grounds the image within its context. The artist thinks of these as Orthodox in style, with the glowing stasis of an icon. Later in the series this outline fades away and the features of Christ, though shadowy, become visible, like a blurred photograph; the ‘halo’ becomes just an effect of the light, while the redness of the figures reverberates outwards in refractions of pigment, bedding the figure within the landscape. There is a deep sense of space within each picture, a sense of the landscape receding into the velvety shadows of dusk towards the edges and into a never-ending light at the centre. The artist is reaching towards abstraction, something beyond figuration or traditional landscape painting.

Colour has always fascinated the artist. He uses only four pigments in his work, each with its own long history within the traditions of oil painting - Titanium white, Naples yellow, Crimson and Cobalt Blue. The blue is striking in the second series of this exhibition, ‘Images of the Crucifixion’. The landscape is based on the photograph taken of the Hungarian Plain, and all the colours used in these paintings are drawn from this landscape, giving a sense of unity and authenticity. The deeper blue towards at the margins fades to a pool of bright white light in the centre, and in this beam of light we see the image of Christ on the cross. This symbolic, instantly recognisable, image is indistinct, composed of pale tones yet with a warmth to them. It is as if the dusty earth of the Plain has been swept up on a breath of air to form this ethereal vision, dust motes caught in a shaft of sunlight. Looking at each canvas in turn the image fades in and out of view: sometimes the horizontal beam of the cross stands out, sometimes this disappears entirely and the body of Christ floats weightlessly, arms like wings. The pose of the body and its treatment alters slightly across the series too. Earlier imagery draws on the awkwardness and obscurity of the Gothic, with knees sharply angled to the left and arms a symmetrical ‘V’. Later a more classical vision evolves, inspired by the drawings of Michelangelo. The image is increasingly insubstantial but, as with the previous series, the features - in this case the musculature of the body - are more discernible.

Michelangelo’s drawings, which the artist spent time studying, would often have been preparatory designs for a fresco; using this technique the egg tempera has to be applied quickly before it dries. Though the artist uses oil paints, his process is very similar, with much preparatory work followed by the completion of a canvas in a single sitting. This gives the images a lightness and vivacity that would be lost if they were more laboured. There is a group of drawings of the Crucifixion which Michelangelo undertook during the final decade of his life, exploring variations on a single theme, which particularly resonate with the artist’s series’ on this same subject matter. The approach is meditative, using drawing as a means of delving deep into personal feelings of faith, in a quest that spans the centuries. The artist’s dialogue between Gothic and Classical imagery embedded within this single iconic image speaks of the long and fraught history of Christian belief. Yet these canvases seems to rise beyond dogma and speak to an all- encompassing spirituality - one that is still very relevant, indeed is needed more than ever, in today’s world. Viewing the Pannonian paintings has an uplifting effect, and the more time one spends in front of each canvas the more one seems to see and to perceive.

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Installation photography by Alice Lubbock

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