Candida Stevens Gallery is delighted to present ‘As if by Osmosis’, a joint exhibition of new works by Kerry Harding, an English painter based in North Cornwall, and Lucas Reiner, an American painter with studios in Los Angeles and Porto. Both artists look to their surroundings for inspiration, focusing on the same subject matter for months or even years at a time.

Preventing any attempts to read her paintings as ‘traditional’ landscapes, Harding employs a number of pictorial techniques that purposefully disrupt each scene and challenge the viewer’s perceptions. This is beautifully demonstrated by a series of eight small-scale paintings that are unified by pine trees, trunks bent by the wind and canopies defiant as they project upwards. Highly detailed cloudscapes and rippling waves are overlaid by the trees, some presented as blackened silhouettes that seem almost cut out from the canvas, some appearing to be formed entirely of their surroundings as translucent shapes that mirror the scenery around them. The effect is such that the eye cannot easily decipher foreground from background, horizon from coast line, or sea from sky, to create a forever changing impression of the landscape. Citing Bridget Riley as a lasting influence, Harding’s interest in the optical-illusory potential of painting is evident in this latest body of work. From the use of stripes to modulate skies with unnerving regularity, the diffraction of paint to almost pointillist effect, to her ability to reproduce clouds and seas in hyper-realistic detail, Harding shares Riley’s ambition to challenge the viewer to be cognisant of the physicality of looking. Oscillating between highly detailed representation and surrealist impressions, Harding’s paintings elicit a range of emotions from unsettled to meditative that reflect the landscape’s continuing ability to surprise and delight the artist herself.