INTRODUCTION :
The paintings of Sax Impey’s ‘Storm’ carry the charge of rescued images; residues of a survivor’s witness imbued with the knowledge that the sea, however much we might forget it, is a wilderness. For many years now Sax has chosen to spend half his year travelling into that wilderness, partly for work, partly to escape ‘the cacophony, the babble of the 21st century.’ When he returns he remembers. Working in his Porthmeor studio with the ocean (and sometimes its waves) at his window, Sax uses the view before him not as his subject but as a conduit, a sensory vessel to transport him back to his time alone on the open ocean...
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Looking through this exhibition I became aware that although an element of Sax’s motivation in taking to the sea is to exchange a world of communication for a world of communion on his return there is, undeniably, a desire to communicate. To tell, to bear a gospel-like witness to what has been learnt and experienced out of sight of land. In ‘Storm’ this is more true than ever, the progression of the work charting a discernable narrative of a storm in the Irish sea. Through these panels we are taken there too, into that space of the awful and the awesome where the presence of the individual is reduced almost to nothingness, where time is at once forever and yet also, in the face of mortal danger, so unbearably limited and precious. The scale of this new work adds to this sense of total immersion. Standing before the largest of these paintings I could feel the spray on my face, smell the salt wind on the night. Most importantly though, I could feel the sea’s movement.
For any artist working with the sea as their subject there is an essential paradox to be overcome. Unlike a mountain landscape, a spread of rural fields, the skyline of a city, even the calmest of seas is never still. Its single element is continuous and constant, and yet ever changing. How then, to capture that protean fluidity, that reactive moment when light and water work off each other to create, just for a second, a vision deserving of evocation? I don’t have the answer to that question but I see it practiced in Sax’s ‘Storm’ paintings. Somehow within these frames the tectonic sliding of giant surface waves, the stirring of a wind-harried current, the rushing of a dawn surge of water, the settling aftermath of a calm are all not so much as captured as suggested. Which is, of course, much better. It is in suggestion that the power of art lies, in as Chekov once said, ‘asking the right questions’. And that is where for me Sax’s work finds its most potent achievement. In drawing upon his lived experience of the sea not simply to ‘tell’ us about it, or even to ‘show’ it to us, but rather to create images at once physical and abstract; images which have enough body to make us feel but also enough light, space and unknowingness to make us think.
Owen Sheers, 2011.