The sublime nature and stillness of the landscapes simultaneously recall petrified forests, the ritual aboriginal burnings of the bush, Dante’s descent in to the bowels of the earth and the allusion to the wounding of the Fisher King and the sympathetic sterility and infertility of his lands that is caused when he is injured. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. Little is left for him to do but fish in the river near his castle.
Weaving strands from ancient celtic myths through to T S Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” with the kind of concerns now 40 years on, that it isn’t the youthful fear of growing old which engulfs our collective thinking, but the worrying concerns that there may not be a future to grow old in at all if we continue to consciously deplete our natural resources and pollute our planet at the rate we are doing. Mark Wright’s paintings encapsulate the psychology of our neurotically dyspeptic world in a place where we are peculiarly happy to wallow in and offer us a focused and penetrating view of our skewed habitue.
