BEN ASHTON
MAY WE LIVE IN IMPOSSIBLE TIMES
Opening Reception: 10 october, 16:30–19:30
Dorothy Circus Gallery, London
35 Connaught Street, W2 2AZ
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
Between heaven and earth, between what belongs to the real and what appears to exceed its laws, May We Live in Impossible Times unfolds, the new solo exhibition by British artist Ben Ashton at Dorothy Circus Gallery in London.
With this new body of work, Ashton turns his gaze towards the Baroque, towards its theatricality, its pathos, and those vertiginous architectures of illusion through which painting once challenged the boundaries of perspective, gravity and the possible.
The title emerges from a deliberate transformation of the celebrated expression “May you live in interesting times”, long and mistakenly attributed to an ancient Chinese curse and popularised in the West in the years preceding the Second World War. Ashton replaces interesting with impossible, reflecting on the cyclical nature of crisis and on that peculiar human condition by which every age, while it is being lived, can seem to push beyond the edge of what had previously been thought possible.
It is from this idea of the impossible, not as an exercise of imagination but as an experience capable of unsettling our certainties about the real, that this new cycle takes form.
Bodies, architectures, clouds and draperies loosen themselves from gravity. They stretch, plunge, ascend. Perspective loses its anchors and the image appears caught in a current that drags, dilates and displaces its very substance.
The lineage of great Baroque illusionism becomes particularly palpable in Ashton’s dialogue with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, in his vertiginous perspectives and skies pierced by light, where architecture seems to dissolve into air, clouds and ascending bodies. Yet Ashton is not interested in reproducing this language. His question is more elusive: how can painting persuade us of the existence of something we know to be impossible?
There is something in Ashton’s process that recalls the great stage illusionists, for whom wonder was born from an intricate physical reality concealed behind the enchantment. The impossible was not simply imagined. It had to be constructed, staged, rehearsed, so that before the spectator’s eyes it might finally appear weightless.
Ashton inhabits the same fascinating contradiction. He does not entrust illusion solely to imagination, nor to the artificial generation of an image. He wants to feel its body, its weight, almost its scent. He constructs it.
In his studio, clouds physically take shape. The characters are raised on scaffolding above his head so that Ashton can observe from life extreme foreshortenings and otherwise inaccessible perspectives. Behind images that appear to defy gravity lies a tangible theatre of suspended bodies, structures, fabricated skies and meticulously orchestrated viewpoints.
Like an illusionist guarding the secret of his enchantment, Ashton constructs the impossible in reality, then allows painting to erase the mechanism.
It is here that the Baroque begins to vibrate with its greatest intensity. Its illusionism transformed the architectural surface into a threshold. Ceilings and cupolas seemed to tear themselves open onto another dimension, allowing apparitions, ascensions, ecstasies and bodies released from weight to spill into the visible world.
Ashton retrieves that vertigo, but carries it into a fracture that belongs to our present.
Where the Baroque dissolved the boundaries of architecture, Ashton acts upon the image itself. He fractures it, stretches it, crumbles it and, at times, seems almost to melt it before our eyes. Faces and bodies dilate, draperies lose their form, perspective buckles, figures constructed with extraordinary precision dissolve into drips and streaks of colour. Painting itself seems to lose its consistency and become liquid.
And yet, within this apparent collapse, the painter’s precision remains intact. Figuration retains the seduction of historical painting while simultaneously seeming to lose its signal.
What might resemble a digital glitch is instead entirely painterly: a pure marvel of chromatic alchemy.
This new cycle, however, is not a rupture. It is another movement in Ashton’s long conversation with the history of painting.
For this reason, May We Live in Impossible Times presents the new Baroque-inspired body of work alongside a selection from his preceding Rococo series. In those portraits, the elegance and composure of eighteenth-century representation were already traversed by distortions that unsettled both figure and painted surface. Now that instability seems to have escaped the portrait and spread into the world around it.
What once unsettled the portrait now unsettles gravity, architecture and space itself.
We fell in love with Ashton’s painting precisely through this ever-evolving dialogue with art history: the idea that the contemporary need not be born from a rupture with the past, but can emerge from an intimate, erudite and radically personal conversation with it.
With Portrait of a Lady, currently on view in Venice in La Nota Mancante at the Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo, we placed Ashton in direct dialogue with works from the eighteenth century. Historical source and contemporary reinvention gaze at one another across time. Art history thus ceases to be an immobile repertoire and becomes living matter once again.
It is this continuity that makes May We Live in Impossible Times particularly significant to our curatorial research. The elegant unease of the Rococo now opens onto the vertigo of the Baroque, and from there towards a still longer history, reaching into the impossible spaces of Surrealism, along a trajectory in which art has continually altered the laws of the visible.
Writing recently on Salvador Dalí, poet Giorgio Maria Cornelio observes:
«Il metodo per non soccombere alla banalità consiste, in fondo, nel far tremare le consuetudini.»
In Ashton’s painting, what begins to tremble is gravity, perspective, the integrity of the image and even that of the painted object itself. Not as rupture for rupture’s sake, but as a way of returning to the familiar a measure of strangeness, enough to make us look again.
Even the support loses its certainty. Ashton works against the rigidity of wood, bending and twisting the panels, altering their contours until the solid appears to become fluid. The frame is compelled to follow their anomalies, and the painting seems to strain beyond the geometry that traditionally separates image from world.
“From the illusionistic heavens of the Baroque to the impossible spaces of Surrealism, art has continually altered the laws of the visible, expanding the boundaries of our experience of the real. Ashton enters this history from a profoundly contemporary position: he does not offer an escape from instability, but gives it a form we can inhabit.”
It is ultimately within our own gaze that May We Live in Impossible Times leaves its inquiry open.
A painting born from a profoundly physical process can assume the spectral appearance of a digitally corrupted image. And today, when it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real from what is visually presented to us as real, an image can appear entirely credible without bearing witness to something that has ever actually happened, existed or been seen.
The exhibition thus returns to the words of Shakespeare with which it began. The question is no longer only how much may exist beyond the limits of our imagination, but how much we can still know through what we see.
Perhaps this is precisely one of the challenges of our impossible times: to learn not to believe in images without ceasing to question them, and without losing our capacity to marvel at their very nature.
