Josh Lilley is delighted to present Rising Tide, British artist Tom Anholt’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

In the courtyard-funnelled sun of his Berlin studio, Tom Anholt paints moonlight. Shades of bone, buttery yellows, a blood moon; spectra of lunar hues bathe the landscapes and vignettes of a bold new suite of paintings. Although each work in this series conjures a distinct and independent narrative, they are all bonded by the values of their making, of the artist as vessel. Drawn from both the landscapes of the European present and the art historical past, Anholt absorbs his sentiments and impressions of the world and art around him, expressing them in a universal language of line and colour.

Anholt comments that the meaning of a given painting may not reveal itself to him until weeks after its completion, his role is simply to present each vision with sincerity, planting a kernel of emotional truth in the hope that it will grow over time. But we can draw some collective conclusions from the endearing enterprise of his subjects. They are travellers, scavengers, wanderers and thinkers. An industrious and dedicated forager rakes the long grass for orphaned objects, cast-offs from the town below, in Treasure Hunter. Here is an eternal optimist, always searching. Perhaps his parallel is the lonely figure amidst a snowy copse in Retired Pirate. Was there real treasure in his past, once plundered now lost, or did he search aimlessly never to find his riches? High above, Cosmic Journey depicts a sparkling constellation of planets, stars and butterflies, stellar forces of unquantifiable power and scale alongside the flickering temporarily of an insect. Each fairy tale feels like an extension of Anholt’s sentiments as a practitioner, each protagonist a part of himself in paint.

Washes, flecks and stains signal the many layers of each composition, building a kaleidoscopic haze of light and tone. The rich, velvet blanket of stars in Nature Lovers is conveyed through the subtle bruising of oil’s wet-on-wet application, whilst the drifts and sky of Long Way Home are speckled with raw, neon pigment- twinkling imperfections on a cracked lens. There is something here in the staging at night or in snow; in both cases the land is altered temporarily, all poised promise and potential, each stream and sea what August Macke called ‘water of illuminated becoming’. There is an abstraction in this breadth of mark making, the quality of surface in the paintings imitating the properties of light itself; on water, through snow, refracted and reflected, as if viewed through half-closed eyes. This is where the twin inspirations of the Romantic painters and Expressionists meet on Anholt’s canvas, in scenes of personal allegory, rendered by means that bring to bear the transcendent potential of paint. These are poems of humility and nobility, all islands in the same glittering archipelago of Anholt’s vision.