city margins
james riches
12–29 November
Riches’ paintings serve as intimate moments of stillness captured in the midst of transition, a preservation of liminal spaces and the eerie fringes at the edge of town in states of flux; the fading cusp of night, the hopeful precipice of dawn.
Ever intrigued by the interplay of light on land, Riches’ paintings capture the fleeting hues and patterns that transform even seconds after experiencing them, palettes shifting with the sun’s gradient arc as shadows stretch, deepen, and engulf.
As we approach the outer skirts of an undefined suburbia, Riches’ urban landmarks are neither monumental nor oppressive. Instead our gaze is directed to the atmosphere, where expansive skies become the dominant presence and traces of urban life emerge sparingly—a roofline, a telegraph pole, a solitary window–an anchor for us under the immensity of the heavens.
Please join us for a drink to celebrate the opening of City Margins on Friday 10 September (6–8PM).
Over the past twenty years, Melbourne-based artist James Riches has cultivated a quiet and sensitive approach to painting, conjuring atmospheric vistas that reward slow, introspective observation as remedy to the attention-demanding immediacy of our image-saturated world.
Trained as a drawer and now primarily painting with oils, James Riches’s small-scale impressions of suburban landscapes evoke the humble, sometimes melancholic, and nostalgic connection we share with the places we inhabit. Never painting from direct observation, Riches rescues fleeting moments from the thaw of time, allowing for the transformations of memory and imagination to turn these ephemeral lightscapes into compositional studies rich in feeling.
“I think painting has the ability to morph our moods and give us measure as our responses change over time through different stages of life.”
James Riches (b. 1973) is an Australian artist living and working in Melbourne. With a career spanning more than two decades, Riches’s work has been exhibited extensively in group and solo shows nationwide. Majoring in drawing, Riches graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from RMIT in 2008. He is currently represented by Brunswick Street Gallery.
