EXHIBITION DATES : In person and online from 22/5 – 10/7
TO REGISTER YOUR INTEREST IN ADVANCE : click here
INTRODUCTION :
A Sandbox in the Soul of the World, Plato’s Anima Mundi, sets off – before sight – a stream of ideas, of Forms in which our spatiotemporal particulars participate.
A sandbox is a site of experimentation; a World Spirit is the creative animating current that flows through the veins, through acts, and into the tones and figures that constitute the structures of Arthur Lanyon’s experiments on matter. He too is a demiurge: a sander, painter, positor reversing in his work Plato’s celebrated line from the Timaeus, that ‘the nature of the Living Being was eternal (timeless)… but he (the Demiurge) determined to make a moving image of eternity’. In Lanyon, the reversal is the determination to make the moving image of the world a captured image of the eternal Forms – as receptacles of Platonia.
A sandbox is a site of experimentation; a World Spirit is the creative animating current that flows through the veins, through acts, and into the tones and figures that constitute the structures of Arthur Lanyon’s experiments on matter. He too is a demiurge: a sander, painter, positor reversing in his work Plato’s celebrated line from the Timaeus, that ‘the nature of the Living Being was eternal (timeless)… but he (the Demiurge) determined to make a moving image of eternity’. In Lanyon, the reversal is the determination to make the moving image of the world a captured image of the eternal Forms – as receptacles of Platonia.
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Yet as we stand here by the shifting sands of the strands, beside the wavings and wanings of our great ocean, in this demi-island that is our own Atlantis with its ancient history captured solidly through the sprawl of neolithic stones – such as Chûn and Lanyon Quoit – and its subterranean fogoul passages of contained darkness, in such an atmosphere we can slip more easily into altered states of seeing the slide from the particular to the universal. Lanyon’s particular expressions are beautifully abstract, but the abstract for Plato is the universal, and for him, the real. The power of these paintings, for me, lie in their particularly-effective ability to reveal universal, primeval Forms of beauty through contemporary forms of manifestation. These are thus as such forms of truth, ancient order within contemporary chaos – phenomena that somehow transcend the subject, the medium, the particular grid of culture, history, place, despite acknowledging all these as causative factors of the art. I am honoured to have Arthur’s artwork as my next book cover due to its exhibiting of such metaphysics at work in the work.
Causative too is Lanyon’s child’s drawing of mighty beasts, shark and jaguar. It is the child that is the final metamorphosis of Nietzsche’s spirit of man, sublating the camel then lion: ‘The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning… a sacred Yes. Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.’ This is to say that we cannot rest with Platonia as it is unmoving even though it instigates movement through history. If creation is truly creative, it must be positive about its own forms that emerge into time rather than from the timeless. The child represents this, and the grid formation and beings of this child’s creation have here lent themselves to these latticed Vorstellungen – representations bearing psychoactive-laden beings encountered therein when one looks with an eye for such n-dimensional beasts, that, without caution, cause ontological parallax.
With these words, I commend Lanyon and the exhibition.
Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
Philosopher of Mind and Metaphysics
Cornwall 2026
BIOGRAPHY :
Arthur Lanyon paintings combine intuitive figurative motifs with an emotive, gestural, abstracted language. His energetic works are sited on a physical and metaphysical cross roads, like a belay between numerous visual and emotional pinnacles. They offer a progressive link between the outside world, the inner architecture of the brain, altered states of consciousness, memory and the unencumbered essence of child’s drawing.
Arthur Lanyon is a British artist born in Leicester, England in 1985. He lives and works from a studio near Penzance, Cornwall. Born in to an artistic legacy, his father was the painter Matthew Lanyon and his grandfather the celebrated, influential and world renowned modernist painter Peter Lanyon. He gained a first class degree in Fine Art from Cardiff University in 2008. Upon graduating he was featured in Saatchi’s ‘New Sensations’ exhibition. In 2014, his work was in the long-list for the Aesthetica Art Prize and was included in the award’s published anthology. His debut Anima Mundi solo exhibition ‘Return to Whale’ opened in 2016, which was followed by ‘White Chalk Lines in 2018, ‘Arcade Laundry’ in 2020, ‘Coda for an Obol’ in 2022 and ‘Moon with a View’ in 2024. Works have been exhibited extensively, notably including Untitled Art Fair in Miami; Zona Maco, Mexico City; the Saatchi Gallery, London; The House of St Barnabas, London; CGK, Copenhagen; Tat Art, Barcelona, Herrick Gallery, Mayfair, OHSH Projects, London and Lowell Ryan Projects, LA. Arthur Lanyon paintings are held in private collections worldwide.