Slippery Glaze: Tristan Pigott's new paintings show how we've become trapped by technology

Pigott’s first solo show, Slippery Glaze, at the Alice Black gallery on Berwick Street, will feature a new body of work spanning painting, sculpture and installation which highlights the way content consumption has now reached a new crescendo intended to "trap" the viewer.

Pigott’s fascination with our straddled position between the real and the virtual has its roots in Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which acts as a foundation for this new body of work. The poem speaks of imagined materialism of infinite individual atoms; falling, swerving and colliding in a boundless void, yet somehow remaining intrinsically connected. Referencing vertical perspective, GPS, Google Maps, drones and satellites, Pigott seeks to make us aware of the invisible space the gaze now must traverse to reach its point of focus.

Starting points for the works include Brexit and Scallop Wars – where a mythical snake is seen eating martini glasses and scallops, resulting in it shitting out pearls that seem to bounce over a "carry on"-esque snippet from a Bruegel painting. Margaret Thatcher’s famous covering of a BA model plane’s new tail-fin designs for lack of British national identity is referenced in the covering of a gin trap (traditionally used for hunting game) with a printed semi-transparent fabric.

Contemporary and historic events are intertwined with references to painters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Richard Dadd and Bronzino: "Loosely I wanted to create a sense that all images on all matter, human included, are able to slip off, disintegrate and be recast, whether metaphorically or literally," Pigott told Creative Boom.

Slippery Glaze runs until Tuesday 22 January 2019. Find out more: aliceblackart.com.