Windward: Peter Matthews

Windward 

The side facing the wind, crucial for determining orientation.

Fred Levine is delighted to present, Windward, an upcoming solo exhibition with artist Peter Matthews in Bruton, Somerset.

The paintings and drawings in this exhibition began their life drenched from the salty fog on a remote windswept coastline in the northern reaches of Hokkaido island in Japan, late spring last year, from there the paintings continued to be devleoped for another several months in the south tropical island of Hainan in southern China.

Travelling alone and working in solitude in nature, these paintings and drawings continue the artist’s poetic and personal search for sublime experiences. The works emerge from time spent straddling silence and moments of suspended reverie: immersion in the ocean, stargazing, hiking, animal tracking, foraging, and forming intimate relationships with landscape. These methods extend a long trajectory of working in remote environments, shaped by previous periods in Peru, Chile, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, England, Iceland, and beyond.

Although painted directly along coasts, hinterlands, and intertidal margins, or drawn while rock-hopping through surf and dense fog along the Pacific, the works are equally informed by a wide conceptual field. Matthews draws from mono no aware, the Japanese awareness of impermanence; wabi-sabi aesthetics; cosmology; ecology; agriculture; shelter-making; mapping and cartography; maritime history; and material practices such as papermaking and carpentry repair.

Working on unstretched canvases packed into a backpack, the paintings often function as makeshift shelter during travel and passage. Their surfaces record a lived, generative process: paintings begin in the landscape, folded, carried, and reopened thousands of miles away, pausing and resuming in different climates and states of mind. Through this intense and personal odyssey, Matthews refines a visual language shaped by exhaustion, insomnia, lucidity, mindfulness, and moments of spiritual ex-stasis. The work exists deliberately at a distance from technological mediation, grounded instead in embodied experience and attentiveness to a rapidly changing world.

Though created entirely outdoors, the paintings seem to hover in an ambiguous temporal space, closer to memory than to the present. They evoke a past that feels within reach yet intangible, sensed, heard, and seen, but emotionally distant. In Windward, the viewer encounters the works as both documents of a physical journey and meditations on absence, impermanence, and the fragile intimacy between human presence and landscape.