The Approach is pleased to present London-based painter Sam Windett’s exhibition of new paintings: Motorway IV. Themes of time, movement and repetition, partly taken from the artist’s memories of driving through the South West of England, resonate throughout the work.

Multiple layers of paint, charcoal and textured marks combining torn and cut paper intertwine, evoking broken landscapes caught in a hinterland between abstraction, narrative and figuration. Physical and ephemeral aspects of road travel are at play in the work, from the scrambled black and white surfaces of the wet road to the static of a car radio and the surrounding darkness of a night drive. References to radio compound not only through painterly representations of white noise, but in dial-like forms and the repeated letters FM and AM. The recurring motif of the disc doubles up both as suns and moons or the headlights of approaching cars. In the smaller canvases, cell structures resemble the veins of vascular leaves, plants or invented ribcages. Seemingly organic forms contradict their evolution from the motif of fragmented mechanical bodies in earlier paintings of aeroplanes or drones.

The feeling of travelling during those ambivalent moments between day and night, dawn and dusk, becomes a permeating presence within a number of the paintings. The allusion towards an existential ‘journey’ can be read as an oblique reference to Christopher Petit’s film Radio On (1979), a British road-trip movie which uses both the M4 and the A4 as its unremarkable backdrop. The film’s stark monochrome aesthetic is interpreted in the paintings with punctuations of dark blues and vibrant reds and greens.