The quiet weight of human experience…. Byron Fredericks’ understanding of why he paints is elegantly freighted. His paintings of figures are rooted in ‘memory, emotion, and imagination’ – in what William Wordsworth describes as recollections in tranquility. It is this slumbrous ease, this feeling of otium, or cultivated relaxation, that emanates from Fredericks’ paintings. However, while languorous, they are not nonchalant or effete. Their sense of cultivation is deeply personal. The paintings are of exaggeratedly large forms, mainly nudes. But these are not replications of the classical odalisque, and neither are they perverse mockeries thereof, in the case, say, of Manet’s Olympia. A sumptuous otherworldly colour palette edges the paintings of male and female bodies away from a reflexive critical debate about the naked and the nude. Instead, we become drunk on colour, mesmerized by languid easeful forms, sensitized to bodies electric.

Fredericks speaks of ‘places that are familiar yet unplaceable,’ of ‘compositions’ that ‘guide the eye through stories both deeply personal and open-ended.’ Such is life when it is no longer selfpossessed, when it understands that as we inhabit the world, the world inhabits us. It is the ‘messy beauty of connection’ that matters, says Fredericks. Therein, gravity meets play, bold colour meets experimental composition, complexity meets curiosity and joy. Edge to edge composition is as vital and as consuming as the colour palette. An acidic intensity pervades the whole.

Noise meets languor. Elegance meets risk.