“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
May We Live in Impossible Times is the new solo exhibition by British artist Ben Ashton at Dorothy Circus Gallery London, presenting a new body of work inspired by the theatricality, vertiginous perspectives and illusionism of the Baroque.
Drawing particularly on Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Ashton explores the boundary between the real and the impossible. Bodies, clouds, draperies and architectures appear to escape gravity, while perspective buckles and precisely rendered figures dissolve into drips and streaks of colour. What might resemble a digital glitch is, in fact, entirely painterly.
Behind these seemingly impossible images lies a profoundly physical process. Ashton constructs clouds in his studio and raises his models on scaffolding to observe extreme foreshortenings from life. Like a stage illusionist, he constructs the impossible in reality before allowing painting to conceal its mechanism.
Presented alongside a selection from his preceding Rococo series, the exhibition continues Ashton’s evolving dialogue with art history. What once unsettled the portrait now expands into gravity, architecture and space itself, connecting the illusionistic heavens of the Baroque with the impossible spaces of Surrealism.
At a moment when the distinction between what is real and what is visually presented to us as real becomes increasingly unstable, May We Live in Impossible Times asks a profoundly contemporary question: how much can we still know through what we see?
