Piers Greville in 2025

Entropic Baroque
20.09. - 11.10.2025

Piers Greville’s new body of work interrogates the traditions of landscape painting through a sustained focus on the sky as both subject and metaphor. 

“Continuing the terrain motif and dealing with the historical idea of landscape painting, I am looking at the sky as an evolving landscape, subject to the same politics and baggage as any terrestrial one. There had been a recurring image on my screen of billowing forms. It entered my consciousness and got to a point where I couldn’t avoid seeing all the time: crashing surf, explosions of war, a booming avalanche, a towering volcanic plume or swirling toxic gas from riot police; then in my actual presence, out the window or at the traffic lights: the towering white cumulus clouds of a perfect summer’s day.

The motif of cloud forms was initially in response to press images of street uprisings: the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong, the Black Lives Matter movement and so much more. The devastatingly symbolic and literal shrouding of citizens in toxic mist by their state is an image I cannot shake. The pathos of these figures shrouded in gas struck me as an echo of baroque cartoons, their swirling mists setting emotions of uncertainty and violence. I recorded small drawings on paper reflecting these protests and these small works led on to the development of the paintings in Entropic Baroque.

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My language of cropping expansive terrains, alludes to a hyperobject (1), a system too big to experience in entirety, with only a fraction being visible. In turning this cropped view to a section of sky, I am thinking of meteorological dynamics in a political dimension, on the edge of abstraction.

My interest in cloud forms has emerged and re-emerged in past work: Histories Collapse, 2008; Vertical Littoris, 2011; Singularity, 2017; etc. and now in this recent body of work. I have long been attracted to their painted form in its own right but also as a through-line from histories of painting. These paintings started as disparate images, collaged from pillaged moments of chaos, both horrific and benign: avalanches, waves, bombs, bushfire, teargas, collapse, clouds and more, the turmoil of now. They are of this moment, of being alive.

I introduced a cutaway subject matter: glacial forms, which are a similarly dynamic, loaded terrain. I have focussed here on glaciers in Graubunden, on the Swiss-Italian border. I was intimately familiar with these places as a teenager, distorted by memory over time and gradually replaced with the images I now have of them, an aerial photograph in an old book, or google earth. One mode is historical record, and the other a more contemporary, live record. All are identifiable marks of a time and place and longing. Raised on a diet of minimalism and materialism, Kitsch was a slur, and ornate decoration treated with suspicion. The baroque existed as a separate space, othered and tastefully contained. In this work I have stumbled into a conversation with a new baroque energy.”

– Piers Greville, September 2025

(1) Morton, Timothy. “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World”, Universty of Minnesota Press, 1 Oct 2013.