David Risley Gallery is pleased to present two new paintings and paper cut-outs by James Aldridge. Full of birds, moths, flowers, skulls and mountain ranges, the work embraces opposites and invites us to enter a world that appears both personal and universal, mundane and fantastical, contrived and emotional. A fascination with natural beauty is sabotaged by the use of field guides as a starting point for much of the imagery.

The paintings recall hunting scenes and heavy metal album covers, Renaissance landscape and 17th Century French scenic wallpaper. They are constructed using a reverse process, in which the background is painted around the foreground forms resulting in an emergence of the image from an intuitive position, where the space unfolds in unexpected ways. The large-scale paintings use pictorial clichés to create new places that engulf the viewer - alone in the landscape.

A similarly strategic process is employed in the intricate cut outs where the negative space is removed, allowing the image to slowly come into being.