Mark Wright 

The aftermath of a napalm strike comes to mind when immersed in the paintings of Mark Wright as synthetic and haunting beauty belie moribund existence in his toxic wastelands. 

The sublime nature and stillness of the landscapes simultaneously recall petrified forests, the ritual aboriginal burnings of the bush, Dante's descent in to the bowels of the earth and the allusion to the wounding of the Fisher King and the sympathetic sterility and infertility of his lands that is caused when he is injured. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. Little is left for him to do but fish in the river near his castle. 

Weaving strands from ancient celtic myths through to T S Eliots "The Wasteland" and The Who's "Baba O'Riley" with the kind of concerns now 40 years on, that it isn't the youthful fear of growing old which engulfs our collective thinking, but the worrying concerns that there may not be a future to grow old in at all if we continue to consciously deplete our natural resources and pollute our planet at the rate we are doing. Mark Wright's paintings encapsulate the psychology of our neurotically dyspeptic world in a place where we are peculiarly happy to wallow in and offer us a focused and penetrating view of our skewed habitue.

Mark Wright graduated from  The Royal College of Art London in 1990.  He has exhibited widely in the UK, USA and Europe. 

Recent  Exhibitions include:  Carter Presents London May 2008 Solo Exhibition, Scope London, Carter Presents 2008, "Fastest With The Mostest"  Carter & Gallagher  London 2007, "Dystopia For All" The Wharf Road project London 2008, Scope Miami 2007, Year 07 London 2007,  "Kamikaze Blossom" Fieldgate Gallery, London 2006, Scope London Carter Presents 2006, "For and From" The Metropole Galleries Folkestone Kent 2005,  i-Level Gallery, London 2003 Solo Exhibition, Rhodes+Mann London 2000 Solo Exhibition. His work  is in  pubic and private collections including:British Airways, David Roberts Collection, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Nick Mason, Pfizers Collection, Royal College of Art, Robert and Susan K. Summer, NY, Sony International, Wellcome Trust

 "A strangely serene beauty exudes from the putrid destruction and decay of Mark Wright's chaotic paintings. Drawing from ancient folklore, poetry and the dischord of '60s radical thinking, Wright creates chilling, petrified scenarios that reflect on our current anxieties about the future. Dante and Thomas Moore inform the unattainable utopia that the artist seeks to deconstruct in these paintings, which allegorise mankind's current drive to destroy, rather than replenish, the natural resources that fuel our modern lives. Although Wright's ficticious landscapes, rendered with near-photographic precision, burst with flourishes of colour, they remain static allusions to a foregone conclusion." Oliver Spall Flavorpill

“Mark Wright’s works, by contrast, are paintings that take up directly what might be called the beauty issue. There is a sweetness and lightpervading the painting, candy or electric colours and a high finish. The imagery is layered, concealed behind the varnish. There is a micro–symmetry within the motifs and a macro-dysymmetry in the composition of each painting. It is a mannerist elevation of artifice within the frame of painting which, despite its references, never quite gives in to landscape. These paintings are rather screens which carry wholly artificial signs towards the remnants of another image of a natural world. The distance between signs and their significands are stretched or entirely uncoupled. There are pointers to particular epistemic systems, to sciences for example, which have drifted too far to be accessible any longer.”