Alone In The Moonlight

Soup presents the gallery’s twelfth exhibition, ‘Alone In The Moonlight', featuring new paintings by Mark Burch, I. Mills and Albie Romero. The exhibition spotlights three emerging artists at an important point in their artistic development, all of whom foreground an emotive and emphatic exploration of memory at the centre of their painting practices. Additionally, all three have an enduring interest in photography as a visual reference for their image-making. Mark Burch, who completed his MA in Fine Art from the Bath School of Art in 2020, examines our minds' tendency to daydream, replaying selected memories in a cinematic, nostalgic loop of subconscious desire. Employing found internet imagery, film stills and his own documentary photography as initial points of inspiration, he then digitally collages, crops and edits each image to impose his own narrative implications. Burch’s anonymised figures hint at our often imperfect recall, while his use of chiaroscuro contrasts and bold colour choices nod to the dramatisation of our own past and our readiness to entertain rosy retrospection. Recently, his compositions have begun to include a liberal application of negative space. The asymmetrical, oversized or otherwise prominent borders applied to Burch’s scenic vignettes evoke censored storyboard layouts, redacted scrapbook pages or polaroid photograph framing, a further nod to a wider, as yet withheld, narrative at play. Similarly, I.Mills, a recent graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art’s MFA painting programme, isolates images from their original intention to examine ambience, atmosphere and the collective experience of our shared surroundings. With a multidisciplinary approach to image making that includes the use of collected colour transparency slides to inform her printed and painted works, Mills portrays moments of particular transience - the view from a moving vehicle, a brief encounter with a moth - to replicate those feelings of longing, wanting or wishing. Often working in watercolour on wood panels, Mills embraces the inherent patination of the wood grain to further obfuscate those fleeting moments, while the addiction of gems, diamantés and stickers to the surface of her paintings awaken a certain childlike wonder and echo photographic backscatter or filmic lens flare. Finally, Albie Romero, who graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2024, compares the dogged pursuit of a painting practice to the importance of a religious, spiritual or supernatural belief system. Raised Roman Catholic but adopting agnostic atheism in adulthood, Romero interrogates myth, mysticism, mind-altering substances and the paranormal as ideological alternatives, distilling such overarching concepts into quasi-sacred depictions. Recently, as the result of a relationship breakdown, Romero has begun to yield to more personal introspection in his work. Using his own medium format photographs as primary reference points, he exploits the meditative catharsis of painting to expunge particularly melancholic memories, whilst retaining the blurred compositional contrivance that allows for effectual outside interpretation.