Painting with Light

Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill, 30 Portman Square, London W1H 7BH

12 October - December 2010

Candlestar is proud to present 'Painting with Light', its fourth exhibition developed in partnership with the luxury five-star hotel Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill, the official partner of the Frieze Art Fair. 'Painting with Light' is an exploration of the boundaries between photography and painting, through the work of five artists.

The birth of photography was attended by the suggestion that the photograph could one day replace the painting. For the early pioneers of the medium it was the photograph’s ability to precisely capture the details of a scene which was highly prized. However, since those early days photography has come a very long way and photographers now increasingly make work that is intended first and foremost for the gallery wall.

Tom Hunter, for example, was the first artist to have a show of his photography at the National Gallery. His images often directly reference and borrow compositions from the works of the ‘Old Masters’. As Hunter says, if these artists had been alive today they would probably have been photographers. Similarly the work of Brian Griffin, one of the world's leading portrait photographers, has been compared to the work of the Dutch Masters and the American painter Edward Hopper, as well as contemporary filmmakers such as David Lynch. Griffin's portraiture visibly embraces Renaissance painting in terms of light and pose. Susan Derges' approach, however, is very different. Her cameraless works are the result of a direct relationship between natural light and the recording medium, resulting in images that are effectively painted by the light itself. Marcus Doyle’s night scenes, in contrast evoke qualities of traditional landscape painting, with extravagant, almost artificial-seeming, colours. The same ethereal quality of light in his images can also be found in Yvonne de Rosa’s work, where it lends her still life scenes a certain incandescence.