The exhibition runs in conjunction with 'I came here a stranger' 13 November - 14 December at the Eagle Gallery, London Eagle Gallery

Fisher’s recent paintings were made in response to two different texts: Wilhelm Müller’s libretto for Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle, and an account written by the English poet John Clare describing his escape from an asylum in Epping Forest and his long walk home to the fenland of Cambridgeshire.

Each text is a description of a journey, undertaken as a result of lost or unrequited love. Fisher uses the framework of the texts in an oblique way to provide the subjects for his paintings, but also makes reference to the form and texture of the two sources in the process of the works.

Just as the experience of Winterreise is a synthesis of words interpreted through music and Clare’s account a blend of observed fact, misremembering and hallucination, Fisher’s images are more complex and go much further than illustrative depictions. The canvases are deeply worked, with hard chalk g rounds layered with bronze dust mixed in wax and glaze upon oil based glaze. The paintings are moved on and off the stretcher, sanded and reduced almost to the weave, so that the images become ghosts of originals long removed from their starting points. Martin Holman writes in the catalogue: “More than illustration can achieve, these images proceed by painting the spaces perceived between words.”

The trauma of estrangement is shown in the silhouettes of two figures buffeted by a pink tinged, snow filled wind; their remembered connection in the tendrils of plants and flowers creeping across the surface of a canvas. Clare’s yearning for his lost, long dead love has been transposed into images of a female figure holding an animal, protectively, to her breast. Elsewhere the paintings erode completely into a tangled, almost abstract mesh of forest trees.

To read the full texts to the exhibition catalogue by Martin Holman and James Fisher download the pdf catalogue above.

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