Charlie Lewis Marffy is interested in painting that is true to the experience of living, breathing and failing. In his paintings, Lewis Marffy seems to offer glimpses into a subliminal world; a place that is rife with confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity. It is conjured through an intuitive immediacy that incorporates its afflictions and derailments into something psychologically challenging. A peculiar darkness is slowly unveiled under the veneer of a ludic sensibility. It is an unfamiliar non-representational space that provokes the imagination with the indication of something internal and personal. The viewer, much like the painter, is invited to navigate the painting as a mental map in the same way an orienteer would. The divergent actualisations, absence of clear horizontal lines and spiralling overlapping forms work in the same way that a cartographer does when he flattens the earth’s surface onto paper.Viewers should not be expected to be faced with clear messages that meet our expectations. Instead, they may be left mistrustful and uncertain of their thoughts, desires and interpretations. In viewing the painting as a metaphor for the title – No Man’s Land, one sees the series operate as an allegory, capturing a feeling of attachment. A disconnection from the world, from others and perhaps even ourselves. It enables us to bring our own associations and disassociations to his paintings. They work on a purely connotative and subjective level of interpretation. The visual language somehow assimilates a wide range of content. Lewis Marffy’s paintings invite our minds to sink and drift with purpose through a myriad of referential relations. All can be interpreted continuously within differing contextures. The spatial syntaxes are entirely devised from Lewis Marffy’s imagination and register as extensions of a diagram that can pose impossible things and invisible forces into perfectly plausible vectors.
About the ArtistCharlie Lewis Marffy (b.1989, England) is a painter, writer, and researcher from Devon who lives and works in London, UK. He attended Exeter School of Art and Plymouth University after which he graduated from the Royal College of Art. Charlie has held residencies in Holland (2015), Cuba (2015) and Singapore (Most notably at the Institute of Contemporary Arts). Upon the completion of his degree, he joined Fabien Fryns Fine Art in the summer of 2022. He is interested in a pictorial space that is true to the experience of living, breathing and failing. A ludic sensibility that points to something psychological and unresolved.