Simon Averill in ‘Entanglement’

NSA member Simon Averill has a new show featuring his ‘Entanglement’ series of paintings at the Anima Mundi gallery in St Ives. The exhibition runs from 28th May to 11th July.

Scientists accept there is much that is unknown or misunderstood about ‘Quantum Entanglement’. It is this uncertainty that gives him scope and inspiration as an artist to imagine and explore. A physicist might say that form and colour do not, indeed cannot, exist at the fundamental level. As an artist he is not bound by these physical constraints – he has permission to misunderstand, to go beyond the physics, to make space for imagination and art.

These paintings are part of a series of over a hundred works that act like thought experiments taking place obsessively and systematically over a number of recent years. Speculative decisions are applied and carried out, each brushstroke a particle, each layer a wave.

As a painter I deal with illusory space on a two dimensional surface. I am testing the possibilities of liminal space where the focus of attention is on or just below the surface. My aim is to heighten the tensions that exist in and between the paintings; the juxtaposition of colour and mark create an optical disturbance that requires the eye to be constantly shifting to locate a point of focus. I work on the paintings in pairs, as they progress the connection can become more or less explicit. New entanglements are made on the surface of each painting and, I hope, in the eye and mind of the viewer. Importantly, I envisage that these pairs will become separated, yet their entangled relationships will remain wherever the individual works are located, accentuating my own interpretation of ‘action at a distance’.

Further information about the exhibition can be found on the Anima Mundi website Preview Friday 27 May, 6.00-9.00 pm. The artist will also be present for an Open Day on Saturday 28 May from 2.00 – 4.00 pm.

Anima Mundi, Street-an-Pol, St Ives, Cornwall, TR26 2DS