On January 25th, Conrad Jon Godly will be opening his debut solo show at JD Malat Gallery in London. To See is Not to Speak at the Mayfair gallery will be the Swiss artist's first UK solo exhibition, as well as the first show in Europe after more than 3 years, and will mark a big comeback of his iconic mountain imagery.
Balancing his work between expressive abstraction and meticulous realism, Godly's captivating renderings of majestic Swiss Alps are a representation of his personal lowest points and most covert feelings and thoughts, as he told us back in 2017. Using heavy impasto technique along with studious yet expressive brushwork, his semi-sculptural depictions of some of the planet's highest points are paying tribute to his surroundings their impact on him both artistically and personally.
While his body of work can simply be described as landscapes, Godly's paintings are actually fully focused on depicting the moods created by the unique play of light against snow-capped peaks. This is especially evident in this new series of 15 medium and large-scale canvases in which significant parts of the images are often concealed by the profound mist and cloud structures. Moving more towards abstraction, the meticulous brush strokes and thick layers of oil are still clearly rendering the desired image, sometimes adding meadows or wild waters to the mix. The coherent body of work is a result of a perfected meditative painting process in which background music is setting the mood and tone of the final work. With most of the paintings being finished within one session, the expressive images are capturing the raw energy of his quick and unmediated creative process. Seemingly consequential sculptural icicle-like drips at the base of the canvas are visually extending the work beyond the limits of the format, purposely adding to the raw and hard-to-control nature some of the Earth's most humbling sights. —Sasha Bogojev
