On today's A Portfolio, we take a look at the work of London-based painter, Christian Quin Newell. In 2021, we wrote about Newell's show at Public Gallery, and have been loving his recent works that we saw throughout 2022.
From Public Gallery: Perhaps best understood as a set of way markers on a journey of personal development, the work of Christian Quin Newell braids his studies of mysticism, psychology and art’s long history into an arresting, otherworldly gestalt. In an echo of early 20th-century Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting), the artist – who is of mixed Jamaican and Italian heritage – presents us with imagined worlds in which enigmatic objects proliferate, Earthly principles of time and space do not quite obtain, and hybrid figures from what might be a mythic past, or an imagined future, struggle towards wisdom, or else lose themselves in a terminally fractured reality.
