Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh is set to show a new series of work by painter Charles Avery. The Eidolorama is a stylistic departure from the complexity of his previous epic imaginary project The Islanders, replacing it with highly-economical shapes which he describes as ‘a community of simple pictorial forms that comply and respond to the quadrilinear order of the rectangles that contain them.’

The forms have no prescribed orientation or location, but exist as complex structures, which Avery calls assemblies, with ‘their genealogy explicitly legible throughout their painted surface. And while the paintings present as closed systems of purely abstract shapes, they also suggest worldly associations to apparently recognisable forms, such as keyholes, pills, corporate logos, angels, planets, cells and sausages… I regard these works as self-evident. This idea might usefully be explained by referring to them not as paintings, but expressions. These expressions collectively form their own argument, one that is never ending and always finished.’

Oban-born, Charles lives and works in London, and Mull on Scotland’s west coast.