Stephen Riley

My work is concerned with the experience, use of abstract qualities of space. In some, particularly my photography, this expresses itself as an exploration of how the spaces we create around ourselves reflect our social and human condition. I explore the semiotic messages - corporate, private, accidental – that we leave in urban spaces in order to communicate. In my painting, space is considered in a more abstract way: I explore spatial possibilities within formal elements of painting, many of which emerge as competing dualities. E.g. tensions between pictorial space and actual physical space, in the form of depth, layers, or objects on the picture surface; and those between colours, forms, edges and zones of particular kinds of paint handling that hint at pictorial depth or relative location. Commissions welcome.