Philip Braham travelled to north eastern Poland in 2002, exploring the ancient forest regions that border Lithuania and Belarus. These landscape paintings and the “Lumen” photographs in this exhibition are the result of this visit to his ancestral homeland.
The language of Braham’s recent landscape work is haunting not because it presents the familiar in an unfamiliar way but because it re-familiarises us with forgotten unease. It returns us to those “everywhere” distances which trouble (and perhaps even define) the Northern European Imagination, distances which unsettle because of their capacity to silence and to hide what is in the open. Despite the edginess of Braham’s work, its language is on a certain level deeply familiar. However, the haunting quality of these works betrays that Braham’s intentions are far from nostalgic. Nostalgia laments the loss of imagined security, of the once familiar and trusted. It yearns to escape the very disquiet that inhabits these recent works.
Nicholas Davey
In association with BCA Gallery
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