4me4you features - “The City from Above”.

During a recent visit to Pontone Gallery, 4me4you viewed Iain Faulkner’s latest series of paintings.

His work has long been concerned with the contemporary city, but in this latest body of work that fascination takes on a new dimension.

Through scale, perspective and an extraordinary sensitivity to light, Faulkner offers a striking vision of Los Angeles, familiar, yet strangely transformed.

Seen from above and at a distance, Los Angeles becomes almost unrecognisable from the city experienced at street level.

From elevated viewpoints such as the Hollywood Hills, Faulkner looks across the vast urban expanse, transforming buildings, roads, trees and infrastructure into an immense composition of colour, form and texture.

Against this cooler palette, vivid pinks, oranges and yellows emerge as the colours of a Californian sunset. The resulting scenes possess an almost dreamlike quality, despite being rooted in close observation and meticulous attention to detail.
For all their scale and complexity, there is also a remarkable sense of order within Faulkner’s compositions

The city appears to have been assembled piece by piece, with individual buildings, roads and architectural forms carefully considered before being brought together into a much larger visual structure.
Blocks of colour define and organise the architecture, while areas of trees and vegetation offer moments of relief from the overwhelming presence of concrete and glass.

Perhaps most striking, however, is what Faulkner chooses to leave out: people.
From his elevated viewpoint, human beings have almost entirely disappeared. There are no crowds, no traffic jams and little evidence of the everyday activity normally associated with a metropolis of this scale.

Instead, Los Angeles seems to acquire a life of its own. The city becomes the protagonist, vast, restless and seemingly independent of the people who inhabit it.
This absence creates an intriguing sense of mystery.
Viewed from above, Los Angeles begins to resemble a contemporary labyrinth: an immense network of streets, buildings and spaces extending in every direction.

There are countless possible routes and destinations, yet no obvious centre and no discernible end.
The city simply continues towards the horizon, becoming increasingly difficult to comprehend the further the eye travels.
It is this tension between order and uncertainty that sits at the heart of Faulkner’s paintings. Everything appears carefully constructed and meticulously observed, yet the larger picture remains elusive. We can see the city in extraordinary detail, but we can never quite grasp it in its entirety.

In Faulkner’s hands, Los Angeles becomes more than a particular place. It becomes a meditation on the modern city itself, its immense scale, complexity and beauty, but also its anonymity, unpredictability and capacity to overwhelm. Seen from above, the city is no longer simply somewhere to live, work or move through. It becomes a monumental landscape to pause before and contemplate: beautiful, disorientating and impossible to fully resolve.

ARTIST: Iain Faulkner

SEE MORE: Pontone Gallery