Forthcoming: Landscapes

Lyon and Turnbull, Connaught St, London

20 - 27 January 2027

curated by Diane Shiach

William Foyle’s next solo show, ‘Landscapes’ with Lyon and Turnbull is an exhibition focusing on a selection of large and small scale works completed between 2015 and 2026. Foyle’s new paintings see the artist return to pure landscape after a period of exploring figuration and text within his work. The show brings together works of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic made following numerous trips made to Central and Eastern Europe. The exhibition will be curated by Diane Shiach and the text accompanying the show is written by Katherine Cole.

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Landscapes by Katherine Cole

William Foyle’s Romanian Paintings see the artist return to pure landscape after a period of exploring figuration and text within his work. A single photograph - a picture taken from the window of a train near Timisoara, in May 2015 - is the inspiration behind every painting in this new body of work. Ten years have passed since this scene was first captured and there is a meditative, dreamlike quality to its iterative reinterpretations in paint which seem to surface from the subconscious.

The snapshot was taken at dawn, capturing the delicate rose tints of the sunrise leeching into the pale blue sky, above a half-ploughed field of green and dark-brown, lines coalescing in a perfect vanishing point on the horizon. On the canvas, this landscape is pared back to its absolute essentials, to the edge of abstraction. It could represent anywhere; but this moment - a specific time and place frozen on film - holds meaning for the artist, and the resulting image represents a state of mind as much as a geographical place.

The artist’s deep absorption in the source imagery allows each canvas to be completed rapidly, in one sitting. The landscape acts as a vehicle for releasing stored meanings, delineated by way of abstract marks applied very quickly, almost intuitively, to the surface. Each painting has its own character and its own language. The first in the series, ‘Landscape, near Timisoara, Romania (sunrise)’, is suffused with the light effects of dawn. The pale pinks and blues suggest a childish innocence in the new day, contrasting with the burnt umber of the dark, still-sleeping earth.

Then, in subsequent canvases, marks - dabs, spots, wavy lines in downward strokes - are superimposed, all in pale hues that seep out of the sky. These marks hover in one's vision, much closer than the distant, blurred landscape beyond; are they perhaps the shadows of condensation on the train window? Or the spatters or paint on the well-handled photograph from which the artist worked? This dual perception makes one question how landscape is viewed - fleetingly in this case, and yet its import and meaning has remained vital over many years, to be revisited and reinterpreted here in 2026.

Just as the colours are lighter than in previous works, so the framing devices that appear in paintings such as 'Landscape I’ are looser. They are not cage-like or enclosing, but offer a numinous visual boundary, disturbing one's continuity of vision while containing the paint within. Elsewhere, in ‘Landscape’ VI for instance, lines begin at the top of the canvas, the paint luminous and thickly applied, fading as the eye falls. Sometimes the paint is pulled across the canvas by a wide brush in a way that recalls Gerhard Richter’s deliberate blurring of his imagery, veiling any specificity. But it also suggests movement - the energetic movement of the paint itself corresponding the speed of a train or rather the blur of the gaze pulled away from a scene. This sense of movement, its brevity studied over an extended period, might also speak of the fleeting nature of time.

Equally, the spot-like marks, as in ‘Landscape’ III and VIII, do not puncture or wound, but dance along the surface of the canvas like dust motes or raindrops on their own visual plane. Neither the landscape nor the marks seem quite in focus; it is, of course, impossible to focus on the near and the distant at once and this seems to encapsulate an experience of life as fluid, a simultaneity of immediate perception and memory. The stripping back of the subject creates an ambiguity; there is no hierarchy to the visual elements on the canvas, and this detachment impels us to view the painting simply as itself, with a meaning related to its own physical presence, rather than as a facsimile of the landscape.

Painting can be viewed as a form of language without words, expressing what is just beyond language to convey. Ultimately, these new landscapes capture something transient, a meditation on time and beauty.

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The second part of the exhibition gathers together a selection of William Foyle’s paintings from 2015-17, around the time that the photographic source material was taken, and creates a

dialogue in time across a decade of work. The studies in watercolour and oil are based on similar landscapes, though often approached very differently.

‘Study of a Cloud, Bohemia’ (2015) uses a similar colour palette to the recent series of landscapes to depict a more direct study of atmospheric conditions. Nearby, an oil painting of the Great Hungarian Plain (2016) is a response to another landscape glimpsed from a train, but here painted in more sombre tones with a vertical rippling effect unsettling the surface of the canvas. Light filters through these intangible bars, dissolving the darkness. This sense of hope in darkness calls to mind the conflicted history of the region and in particular the Holocaust, a subject which William Foyle has explored previously in his painting and which continues to play a part in the reading of these landscapes.

The photograph that inspired the large-scale ‘Landscape, Slovakia I’ (2017) is a still taken from film shot from another train window in the depths of winter. Its wide red square motif resonates, Rothko-like, against the bright icy scene. The orange-brown, sienna earth tones of this and the watercolour studies contrast with the darker Romanian soil of the new body of work, the artist remaining true to the essence of the landscape. At the same time, its colours - the virginal blue and terracotta tones - relate it to the art of the Renaissance.

These earlier works add a depth and context to the new landscapes, bearing witness to the artist’s intensely personal creative engagement with the imagery over time.

Essay by Katherine Cole

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