There’s beauty to be found in urban wastelands, post-industrial sites and weathered surfaces. This is what painter Cristina Gardiner ARBSA encourages viewers to see in her atmospheric exhibition ‘Transitory Landscapes’ at Birmingham’s RBSA Gallery.
Featuring recent work, this solo show has been curated into three distinct yet interconnected sections: ‘Estuarine_time’, ‘Urban_ space’ and Elemental _ light and emotion’. Throughout, there are echoes of Gardiner journeying past churches and warehouses, concrete and glass, canals and squares, in cities such as Birmingham.
Geometric shapes within shapes glow blue among heavy black verticals in ‘The Flyover’, 2024. Part of a triptych of paintings, displayed aptly in a column, these canvases point to Gardiner’s long and successful career as a conservation architect concerned with the wellbeing of old buildings, many of them listed Historic England sites.
But in her paintings a precise and recognisable location has been replaced with shifting perceptions and a sense of flux. Fragmented, maze-like scenes offer viewers no route map but uncertainty, which only builds under inky, night-lit skies.
An even more mysterious, dream-like quality defines ‘Wolf moon on the Estuary’, 2024. Painted in muted blues and turquoise approaching black, organic forms contrast with sharp diagonals below a dramatic horizon line in the imposing, large-scale composition.
The artist has taken viewers into landscapes somewhere between reality and imagination, which becomes more forceful in ‘Imaginary Horizon’, 2023. Solid, pared-back structures stand like protagonists, who have arrived in a line at the vanishing point.
Their static presence contrasts with the dark swelling sea, a vast and potentially violent force. Even while looking at the surface of this painting, the weather seems to change, as reflected in the exhibition’s well-chosen title.
A real highlight of the show, this smaller canvas belongs to ‘Estuary_time’ and a series first begun in 2020, during lockdown, when the artist took a long circular walk along the River Severn towards its confluence with the Teme. The Severn had recently flooded and, although the level had subsided, the current was still racing past, proving nature’s power.
That power reaches a crescendo in the final section, ‘Elemental_light and emotion’, where it’s evident that light is another primary concern for the architect-turned-artist. She has set many of the scenes at twilight, and this time of day brings out saturated hues and intriguing shadows which play across man-made structures.
Another highlight of this show is a large oil on canvas, ‘Born with the Moon in Cancer’, 2024, which demonstrates an artist painting more intuitively, feeling her way through a mystical blue palette. Gardiner doesn’t sketch her compositions out first but allows them to evolve organically. Tracking its way across the abstracted, patterned surface, is a changing moon; repeated in various cycles from crescent to full circle, it seems to hold promise. Across paintings in the show, the moon makes reappearances, as if asking to be spotted.
On this canvas, there are also distinct areas of more textured mark-making, as if the artist has been scratching away at surfaces to unearth memories hidden below. For an Italian-British artist who once lived in Florence, trained and worked in Birmingham, and is now based in Worcester, she seems to be questioning more personal belonging associated with physical place.
Filled with thresholds and spaces of intersection, Gardiner’s paintings have a composite quality which points to her multilayered identity and experiences. It also hints at her process, as she “gathers impressions” of sites in photographs and sketches which inspire preparatory works, including linoprints, back at the studio.
In turn, these source images are cut up and pasted into collages. On show are a dynamic series of 16 framed works copied from her sketchbook, which the artist refers to as an “urban mashup”. A collision occurs between cut and paste imagery of windows and archways, trees and concrete, which gives Gardiner “an idea of how to paint”, without dictating the final composition.
The collage aesthetic of her creative process carries over into her paintings, which convey the fragmented nature of memories – for all of us. Light and spaces stay in the artist’s mind, and that’s what she adds to canvas, using abstraction to capture the essence of a place. She seeks to “dissolve boundaries between memory, imagination, and lived environment”, and that has been achieved with emotive effect.
Gardiner’s paintings also remind me of what Gaston Bachelard termed ‘The Poetics of Space’: no physical site is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. This thoughtful artist invites viewers not only to look but to wander through places, which often go unnoticed or underappreciated, where conscious and unconscious thoughts abide. At the RBSA Gallery, Gardiner has painted ordinary places as places of possibility.
Free to visit, ‘Transitory Landscapes’ runs from October 21 – November 1 at Birmingham’s RBSA Gallery. There is a Private View, open to all, on Saturday 25 October from 2-4.30pm, when you can meet the artist, as well as Brian Wood and Debbie Baird, whose show ‘Ego: Identity And Power’ launches at the same time.
Find out more: Cristina Gardiner ARBSA, Transitory Landscapes / Debbie Baird and Brian Wood, Ego: Identity And Power
