The paintings in Lewis Brander’s present exhibition depict skies and landscapes; some are derived from the view from his studio window in London.

Lewis has attended to the natural world since his days at Goldsmiths, when he resisted the prevailing emphasis on conceptual practices and instead made small, representational paintings. These ranged from human figures to ancient temples and landscapes, rendered in a manner that dissolved and shimmered, denying the image easy resolution.

Over time, Lewis turned increasingly toward the London he knows so well, situating himself within a lineage that includes artists such as Frank Auerbach and, before him, John Constable, who lived and worked in Hampstead. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Constable went out onto Hampstead Heath—the wildest and most beautiful landscape in London—with palette and sketchbook in hand, making studies of clouds and skies, an activity he called “skying.”

Blue Shift (2025-26), one of the first paintings encountered on entering the exhibition, is among the most powerful Lewis has produced. Shading from pale lilac to deepest purple, the diffused tonal shifts create a surface at once atmospheric and insistent. Like the sky itself, the colours never settle but remain in motion—at times fluorescing, at others turning metallic, coppery. The effect is of a drama unfolding: weather in flux, the painting offering more the longer one looks. Sky and ground are almost indistinguishable. Lewis works slowly to achieve this effect. In earlier stages, the horizon line is more apparent, but painted mark is laid over painted mark until distinctions loosen and detail all but disappears.

When I first saw this work in his studio, I was reminded of the Heath, whose vistas I know well. The violets suggested heather. In fact, the work derives from a view in Shoreditch Park, where he walks in the evenings and which is just visible from his studio window. Haggerston, in east London, runs along a stretch of Regent’s Canal, a place with which Lewis has developed a sustained connection. He has worked in his studio since 2022, walking each day along the towpath from Angel.

The view is not simply observed but refracted through the history of painting. Blue Shift carries an awareness of precedent: Constable and Turner, to be sure, but also American colour field painting and, further back, Whistler, whose tonal paintings and aestheticism it invokes. Whistler, too, painted London, most notably in his Nocturnes of the 1870s: evocations of the Thames at night that scandalised contemporary viewers for their proximity to abstraction or, in Ruskin’s cutting phrase, for “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

One of the other large paintings in the exhibition, Night Studio (2025-26), installed opposite Blue Shift, develops these concerns in a different register. Here, we look not only at a landscape but through it, as though moving within the painter’s perceptual field. The image is brought to the edge of legibility. The colours are more subdued than the electric intensity of Blue Shift; the resulting atmosphere is quieter. With careful attention, its nuances emerge: violets gathering at the lower edge, then peaches, then greens that press forward in the upper half. Landscape is transformed into a mystery of colour—inscrutable as sunlight through a closed eye.

These paintings draw partly on observation, partly on memory, but are ultimately shaped by the demands internal to the composition. Constable’s sky studies were famously diaristic—he recorded not only dates but exact times of day on the backs of his watercolours and oil sketches, allowing the season and even the month to be identified. Lewis’s work was made and unfolds more slowly. While these paintings might be understood as records of a working life—every painting retains the memory of its own construction—they are made over extended durations. The exception is Night Studio, which he executed in just one sleepless night. 

The grandeur of these large paintings is offset—and tethered—by smaller, more intimate works, Wharf (2025-26) and Angel (2025-26). In Angel greens rise into old pinks, purples, and oranges, animated by the crackle of egg tempera as solvents dissolve into its surface. This technique reveals Lewis’s interest in a different kind of weathering; the painting’s atmosphere is nostalgic. Wharf is a small jewel of a landscape in oranges and yellows.

An important part of Lewis’s practice is sketching, often in situ along the edge of Regent’s Canal. This practice reaffirms that his work remains grounded in close observation of particular places, however abstract it may appear. When we met to discuss the exhibition, Lewis showed me a photograph on his phone of trees he had sketched along a stretch of canal known as St Vincent’s Terrace. It revealed the precision of his looking: in the sketches, trees rise in subtle gradations, their forms tapering into fiery peaks.

Lewis has long been interested in Japan and recently returned from a trip there, an experience that informs recent work. His previous exhibition in London, at Vardaxoglou, was titled East and West, referring not only to sunsets and sunrises but also to the generative dialogue between so-called Western and Eastern artistic traditions. In Japan he was particularly struck by ceramics where the glaze pulls away from the clay during firing, creating areas of crawling that leave the surface irregular and alive. These effects have suggested new possibilities for painting. He also became interested in celadon glazes and has attempted to evoke similar optical effects through passages of paint that reflect rather than absorb light, using mediums such as linseed oil, damar resin, and beeswax. Something of this luminous instability is visible in Canalside (2025-26) and Riverbanks (2025-26), both of which share celadon’s translucent shades of greyish-green. It is characteristic of Lewis’s work that London’s otherwise sullied canal—its bed visible through the murky water, strewn with litter—should be painted in a way that recalls the delicate glaze of treasured ceramics.

Closer to home, Lewis has pursued sustained technical research into Western painting methods, working with Mary Bustin, formerly of the Tate, who was involved in the restoration of Rothko’s Seagram Murals. In 2025, he travelled to Naples and Pompeii to study the works Caravaggio painted in Naples during his exile from Rome, and to spend time with the frescoes of Pompeii. What interested him there was not only Caravaggio’s use of tenebrism and chiaroscuro to create tonal drama, but also the qualities of ancient fresco painting, whose surfaces retain a distinctive powdery character. As ever, his interest is predominantly in matters of form, materials and techniques, rather than subject matter.

The aestheticism of Lewis’s pictures pulls in two directions at once: stand before one of the larger paintings and you feel yourself enveloped by colour, drawn into an atmosphere that can be at once tumultuous and soothing. These paintings reach up to the threshold of everything: the sublime, the transcendent, the universal. Yet they also descend toward a kind of abasement, where coloured oil paint becomes lurid, excessive, and open to chance. There are moments when the surface breaks open into drips and scumbles—interruptions that unsettle the painting’s coherence. The brushwork is often foregrounded, more so than the image it reaches for. Each painting moves between control and surrender: abandon as a condition of emergence and release.

If one looks closely, as Lewis does, any city sky will reveal unexpected qualities: metallic sheens, copper tones, moments of garish intensity. The landscapes in this exhibition are emptied of figures, but they are far from neutral. In one painting, the task is to register subtle shifts in evening light as they alter the colour and atmosphere of sky and city; in another, to evoke tones that accompany rising temperatures or the gathering dusk. If the hues verge on the lurid, it is because they are touched by what intoxicates: pollution as well as desire. “Landscape is my mistress,” Constable once said. Something of that intimacy persists here, and it is hardly innocent. These works present a vision of the world charged with sensuality and unease—beauty held in tension with the conditions that threaten it.