'Invisible Cities' inspired by the writing of Italo Calvino explores interpretations of the built environment and its impact on our emotional, psychological and intellectual lives. These paintings and drawings are musings on the city’s extended life in our imagination and dreams. Each painting conjures up new images of the past and future. The artist explores how we inhabit our environment both externally and internally through both familiar and unfamiliar landscapes.

Italo Calvino’s book, upon which the exhibition is based, is a series of dreamlike descriptions of imaginary cities through which Marco Polo travelled on his journey  to China. In common with Calvino’s poetic imagery, these paintings explore how our perceptions of place are shaped by memory, desire and loss. Each painting explores a sense of distorted movement and measurement contained in architectural drawing.

The architect Aldo Rossi wrote that ‘In order to be significant, architecture must be forgotten, or must be present only as an image for reverence which subsequently becomes confounded with memories’, If the city holds our collective memories, as Rossi suggests it is subject to the  deviations and mutations of time. It becomes a fragmented web of reflections of the original and perhaps, ultimately, something new. The city is not only the vessel which contains our lives, it creates us and brings us into being.