Alex Gough’s ongoing ‘Wilderness in Paint’ series is a material embodiment of nature’s behaviour and how it is encountered. What might initially be interpreted as traditional abstract painting, on closer looking reveals itself to be a palimpsest of organic reactions that have been incited and masterfully contained within the paintings’ edges, becoming almost sculptural in places. While Gough is not directly painting landscape, the process and sensibilities of his work are informed by his Finnish roots and experiences within the vastness of the Finnish landscape with its shifting, ethereal light. Having always made his own paint, in recent years Gough has begun working with raw materials such as copper, cast iron powder and salt, playing with processes of oxidisation to create colour and texture. Copper becomes almost like a living palette in this process, from which Gough harvests the reactive materials and repurposes them onto canvas or inkjet paper, where they continue to evolve, transform and decay. Intricate blooms of colour and texture are created, geological terrains appearing amidst inky swells.

Organic matter erupts from the surfaces of the works, autonomous in its formation. There is an otherworldly essence, as though, by harnessing these reactions, Gough allows the work to reveal something of nature that we could never replicate—a private moment of its making. Our human eyes search for something we can recognise in the work, strata in a rock formation perhaps, or undulating coral in a phosphorescent sea. But the work is a representation only of itself, of its own becoming. In this way, the work becomes a microcosm of our relationship with nature, the canvas or paper a threshold that allows the materials their own agency through processes of crystallisation, oxidation and accretion, while containing their wildness. The work is simultaneously living, evolving, decaying and eroding, Gough orchestrating its becoming while allowing unexpected processes to unfold, maintaining a balance between chaos and control.

There is a tension in the work between its beauty and its impermanence, much like the changeability and impermanence of nature. While the chemical reactions of the materials create exquisite surfaces, these surfaces are fundamentally unstable, at constant risk of erosion or decay. The work is continually shifting and transforming, just as the landscape endlessly evolves, sometimes imperceptibly, while we are within it — clouds moving, trees shedding, tides pulling inwards and outwards. Gough’s paintings act as a conduit to the internal and psychological landscapes incited by nature’s profound effects and behaviours, becoming spaces for nature to exist rather than as sites of representation.

Text by Tess Charnley