Sirens

Motivated by a sense of the carnivalesque, Ryan Mosley’s canvases offer up a surreal world of invented characters and rituals that seem at once arcane and futuristic. Mosley develops these theatrical subjects through a spontaneous approach to painting. ‘They’re like giant watercolours,’ he says of his works. ‘I build them up through translucent thin washes; painting one colour over the top of another might suggest something – for example cadmium orange over yellow suggests gold. They’re quite gestural, they look like batik or dyed canvas. The surfaces are “slippery”, they have an oily seductive quality – the brush just glides over it. Sirens comes from Greek myth, and I was interested in 19th-century paintings of far-flung Greek narratives that were done in a very British way. The characters look quite mechanical like Automatons but perhaps are also able to hold an interesting conversation, so they can suggest something else, especially the costumes: a rahrah skirt, Danish milkmaid’s outfit, devil’s cloth. It’s both frightening and enchanting.’