Frestonian Gallery is delighted to present four artists showing together for the first time, whose works span a wide range of materials and techniques, brought here by their shared fascination in constructing surreal and beguiling landscapes and narratives.

The recent series of works by Christopher Cook on display draws heavy influence from the Perisan miniature tradition, which has been of particular interest to Cook for its synthesis of eastern and western / late-renaissance traditions. The works, rendered in gently glittering graphite, employ mostly eastern compositional elements, as the various narrative components are ‘stacked’ within the middle ground, with their positions in the picture plane – rather than their scale – denoting relative distance. The various animals, human figures and natural forms all bring symbolic charge to the tableau, from the timeless (the monastic form in Storm guru and the hooded bird of prey in Heart) to the contemporary (the razor wire in Promised lands), underlining the uneasy and fragile meeting of two artistic and historic ideologies.

For Wenhui Hao the landscape of painting is invariably a stage set for the presence of the naked human form. In Meet me in the pale late spring a female form lays in repose in a hallucinatory and ethereal forest clearing, whilst two figures are intertwined before a red waterfall in On the night I fled in panic. The figures in Hao’s works emerge and submerge within a broader abstract language of intuitive and highly physical painting – a practice that is is fuelled and defined by Hao’s skilful balance of passion and control.

The control and mastery of medium is immediately apparent in the extraordinary watercolours of Qian Qian. Her series of ‘fallen angel’ paintings took initial inspiration from the William Blake painting The ancient of days, and expands on the notion of heaven and earth converging through surreal and complex allegorical figure studies. The ‘angels’ become increasingly deconstructed – as in The maze – where the body itself has dissolved into a few core components, held together by swirling energy, as the remanants of the man-made (the golden chain and shackles) fractures amid the chaos.

If Qian Qian’s paintings are redolent of the heavens, the works presented by Mircea Teleagǎ bring to mind the earthly shrine. Everyday, incidental objects are elevated to the status of central figures, and are surrounded by improbable and impossible compositions. In Time trap wild flowers and grasses sprout from the foreground of an interior domestic scene; in Angel a child’s toy towers over a landscape composed of palm trees and stacked air-con units. Teleaga writes of his paintings, in a sentiment that could be said to be the unifying factor of all the extraordinary painters in this exhibition: “The works have their own running of events, unrelated to our own”.