ROSS TAYLOR

Near Light

Sophie Gannon Gallery

09 Sep 2025 – 27 Sep 2025

Ross Taylor’s new exhibition consists of a considered series of eight paintings held together under the moniker of 'Near Light'.

'Near Light' navigates the terrain of landscape painting while also holding other painterly languages; of abstraction and landscape, colour and light, presence and absence within an embodied painting practice. The deep language and terrain of painting can be found and mused upon in these works if we look, engage and feel.

These paintings are unified by a traditional landscape structure, yet their narrative remains elusive. Figuration is absent, but what emerges through abstraction and painterly techniques is a palpable presence, a sense of memory, and perhaps, an echo of humanity. There is a sensation of familiarity, as though the viewer knows these landscapes intimately. The land is not simply seen but felt. The landscapes seem to materialise from the ether, drawn from memory, summoned at will, and explored as painterly terrain rooted in Taylor’s surroundings on Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung Country. These are not literal representations but emotional cartographies, shaped as much by lived experience as by the act of painting itself.

These works allow for deep considerations around painting, they show us Taylor's embodied practice. We feel this expression through technicality; the paint itself hovers on the edge of slippage, fixed forms slip and give way to colour, colour gives way to other colours and horizontal planes give way to the vertical. Taylor doesn’t just paint; he scumbles, mottles, bleeds, uses solvent to eat and thin the paint, creates tensions through thickness pushed up against washes or blurs in opposition to a considered vertical palm.

Colour is often highly saturated, yet when placed against muted tones, it softens, calming itself. Colour and light are used not only to direct the eye, but also to slow its movement, creating moments of stillness and allowing the gaze to rest. These painterly choices are reminiscent of a poem being worked and reworked, moved around, layered and stumbled upon. The paintings foreground his painterly process, while simultaneously inviting the observer to traverse the landscapes, encouraging personal engagement, interpretation, and the evocation of embodied memory.

Essay by Amber Wallis