To Distraction, Southwick explores this search for escape through a contemporary lens, mapping his experiences along the Côte d’Azur, a region long associated with artistic sanctuary and architectural innovation.
To Distraction, Rex Southwick’s latest exhibition with Unit London Gallery, draws its title from Éperdument (1962), an expansive work by Dorothea Tanning. Painted after her move from America to the South of France in 1957, Tanning’s piece evokes a search for creative sanctuary, a theme that closely mirrors Southwick’s own artistic pursuit.
His large-scale paintings offer intimate, sometimes mundane glimpses behind the scenes. Spaces that are typically designed for display, now reimagined as lived-in environments. As in much of Southwick’s practice, the relationship between people and place is central: how architecture shapes human behaviour, and in turn, how individuals leave their mark on the spaces they inhabit.
Spanning nearly a century of architectural experimentation, the series draws from a wide range of styles, from the minimalist modernism of the 1920s, exemplified by Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027, to the organic exuberance of the 1980s, seen in the Palais Bulles, a hallmark of the French “bubble house” movement. For Southwick, the Côte d’Azur is not just a backdrop but a densely layered site of artistic and architectural heritage, compressed into a remarkably narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean.
These paintings are rich in visual texture and labour. They capture a sense of quiet authenticity, reflecting the effort required to maintain an idealised escape. Human presence, sometimes overt, sometimes implied, is never absent. Rather than romanticise an untouched landscape, Southwick acknowledges and foregrounds the traces of everyday life. His compositions are meticulously constructed, balancing formal integrity with visual density.
Throughout the series, echoes of Pierre Bonnard’s work emerge. Bonnard, who lived nearby in Le Cannet, often framed the sea through ambiguous edges and fragmented forms, an approach mirrored in Southwick’s treatment of space. Silhouettes of gardeners, fragments of structures, or abstract forms hover at the margins of the frame, hinting at narratives just beyond view. Like Bonnard, Southwick invites the viewer to consider what lies outside the picture, or just beneath its surface.
Ultimately, To Distraction is a meditation on escapism, both its allure and its limitations. Through detailed, atmospheric depictions of some of the Riviera’s most remarkable (and overlooked) spaces, Southwick invites us to reflect on the complexity of the environments we build around ourselves, and the quiet, persistent presence of the human hand within them.
Artist: REX SOUTHWICK
Artist: Christabel Blackburn
