Damien Minton Gallery

Angela Lane’s tiny paintings are about big themes. Taking her cue from the miniaturist landscape backgrounds of late 15^th and early 16^th century Netherlands’ painting, she forges contemporary updates through some very hot topics. For late medieval Christians, the hottest topic was the serious and relevant implications of the Biblical Fall of Man: the prospects of hellfire, the end of the world and the Last Judgement – prospects sharpened by experiences of plague, famine and war.

The landscape backgrounds she draws on are very often the sites of narratives to do with The Fall, their vivid depictions of suffering, fear and doom adding sharp spice to the paintings’ often serene foregrounds of Baptisms of Christ, nursing Madonnas, the turns of the seasons as well as ordinary people going about their daily lives.

Lane’s works foreground this narrative tradition, giving it an awesomely contemporary twist in the process. The paintings inspiring her art are about men falling out with their God. Her own works are about humanity falling out with their planet. These intricately painted vignettes speak not of a spiritual crisis but a very pressing prospect of doom as seas rise, cyclones increase and food becomes scarcer – the prospect’s of social chaos this time. The beauty of these paintings seduces us, but once trapped by their charm we’re forced into a contemplation of our own Fall. These are works not just to decorate walls but gently to awaken our consciousness.

- Peter Ireland