Foreword by Sarah Long
EMPIRE, exhibition catalogue, October 2016

EMPIRE is David Wightman’s first solo exhibition with Long & Ryle and is the culmination of over two years of collaging, painting, and imagining. His fictional landscapes pay homage to earlier landscape painters from different periods and continents. The colour-explorations of the impressionists and post-impressionists have had their influence, as too has the compositional economy of Japanese wood-block art. Although the tradition of landscape is the obvious reference for Wightman, geometric abstraction and the colour theory of Josef Albers have also played their part in the development of his work. As a graduate of the Royal College of Art, Wightman is keenly aware of the pedigree of those artists that went before him. However, regardless of influences, his paintings are wholly unique and personal.
 
The surfaces of Wightman’s intensely-coloured acrylic paintings are made from meticulously hand-cut collaged wallpaper using a technique similar to marquetry. Each piece is painstakingly collaged, crafted, and painted over a period of several weeks. Wightman's innovative use of wallpaper to create detailed and textured surfaces - simultaneously a reference to mountainous terrain and domestic modernity - is inspired by his wallpaper-clad childhood home in the North of England. Along with texture, colour has also become an obsession of Wightman’s practice. Magenta and orange-hued skies fluoresce above cool cyan and ultramarine lakes. Grey is used to temper and heighten colour combinations while deep indigo and Prussian blue firmaments contrast with lemon-yellow and coral-pink pools. A tinted-cobalt waterfall pours from purple-hued rocks and snow-capped mountains are painted with a variety of sweet pastel tints. It is difficult to imagine another artists’ palette as more opulently colourful.
 
His landscape paintings are beautiful distractions. The intricate collaged wallpaper and unusual colour choices are compelling: they function as abstract compositions as well as imaginary vistas. His paintings offer a glimpse of another world - seemingly real yet entirely fictional. Cherie Federico, editor of Aesthetica Magazine, has said: “You must spend time with Wightman’s paintings; on the surface they are beautiful and intricate and, like the layers they are made from, there is so much depth to his work”.

Sarah Long
Director, Long & Ryle