Passenger
by Simon Turvey
Federation of British Artists
Turvey’s figurative work consistently has a very bare, almost chilling, quality of light. Pale to the the point of being white, his colours appear almost through a milky film. His figures are haunting, not cruelly, but with a poignancy that crisps every detail and expression. His people appear frozen, a memory of a moment in time; there seems little life in their alabaster skin for us to imagine anything beyond. These scenes are not void of life, but isolated from a before and after; the composition seems concentrated, distilled it seems for detail. In Passenger, we have the added layered film of the train window; encapsulating a view not only in its physical frame, but in the cold light of what is ‘outside’ from where one looks from. Here Turvey captures the separation one feels from the world they pass by, and it is this effect that is created with his pale treatment of light — the cold clarity of onlooking. His paintings become freeze-frames quite literally. Detail, then, is allowed to the maximum as we are left to ponder these scenes for themselves alone; they become realist to the point of becoming unreal — unreal in the sharpness of their visual articulartion, which gives them this chilling, vaguely unsettling, edge.
