Paintings by artist William Reinsch featuring recurring ideas that exist together in a shared world. Born in Essex, England, Reinsch has been working on this series of paintings since 2019. While there is no explicit meaning tying them together they all reflect a natural evolution as new elements are brought in and can be seen as Reinsch’s attempt to deal with the inner workings of his own mind.
“The reason I call this place Naked Island is because it exists in isolation (separate and hidden like the unconscious) and the island itself is naked, revealing some kind of hidden truth. The newest addition to this series is emergency blankets. It took a long time to find the next ‘thing’ that fit in this series as I need things to come up naturally and this can take many years. Fortunately, I found after many photoshopped collages that these blankets had great potential. They are surreal yet believable, wrapping and concealing the figures in ways that feel both unsettling and compelling. They carry layered associations, from their name (emergency, survival, safety) to the iconic images back in 2015 especially of refugees wearing them. And lastly, they are simply visually striking and their iridescent light and geometry nicely juxtapose against my set up dark scenes.”
William Reinsch is currently preparing for a series of solo exhibitions next year in London, New York and Mexico.
