Piers Alsop Solo Exhibition | Like An Ancient Day: 13 Soho Square, London

Serious humour, imaginary realism, optimistic lament – in his first solo exhibition ‘like an ancient day’ Piers Alsop expresses a series of allegorical episodes, which have come to suggest meaning beyond absurdity, and an abiding faith in the uncertain.

Drawing on different art forms and historical references, Alsop offers oblique narratives that do not promise gratification but instead balance emotion with logic. There is something indeterminable about Alsop’s paintings, which are imaginatively figurative, attended by pastiche characters, and often rendered in vivid colours. Scenes which brim with tense ambiguity wittily suggest that maybe none of it means anything.

This group of eleven paintings, made primarily between the months of March 2020 and June 2021 were in part a response to William Langland’s late 14th-century poem Piers Plowman – a sequence of 22 complex dream-visions in which, the narrator, Will, meets a series of allegorical characters in an exploration of faith. Alsop’s paintings are invocations across time and space which allow an opportunity to enter strange realms.