In Quietness and Light
M+M Gallery is pleased to present In Quietness and Light, a group exhibition bringing together the work of seven contemporary artists whose practices traverse the thresholds between natural order, inner stillness, and surreal consciousness. On view from June 26 to August 8, 2025, the exhibition unfolds at our Hong Kong space.
In Quietness and Light reflects a shared inquiry into the genre of landscape—long a subject of artistic investigation—through distinctly individual visual vocabularies and narrative strategies. The featured works move beyond representational fidelity, instead reimagining the landscape as a psychological terrain where emotion, memory, symbolism, and illusion converge. The result is a quiet yet charged visual experience, rich in subtle resonance.
Julia Aldegren and Francesco Cima are guided by intuition—an instinctive sensitivity to the organic world that informs their respective approaches. Their works create meditative pictorial spaces where nature and abstraction converge through a contemplative focus on plant life, spatial rhythm, and the raw vitality of organic form.
Josh Raz constructs psychologically heightened visual realms through near-psychedelic color palettes and nuanced tonalities of light. His paintings lead the viewer into a dreamlike forest of the subconscious, where shifting patterns and watery textures seem to whisper ancient truths—delicate, intimate, and charged with narrative ambiguity.
A former longtime studio assistant to Lucian Freud, David Dawson has found a quietude in the Welsh countryside. Painted en plein air in Montgomeryshire and completed in his London studio, Dawson’s landscapes respond to seasonal shifts with a contemplative ease, evoking the serenity of pastoral life. In contrast, David Brian Smith transforms rural memory into a symbolic stage for emotional projection. Drawing on folkloric motifs and densely layered brushwork, his works conjure surreal, emblematic visions steeped in allegory and personal myth.
The works of Nino Kaplandze and Louis Fratino foreground the interior realm of consciousness and feeling. Trees, figures, and architecture emerge as fleeting apparitions—less depictions than questions in flux. Transparent colors, mural-like layering, and painterly erasure build visual density, grounding the ephemeral in the sensuous.
In a suite of lithographs created in 2022, Louis Fratino draws inspiration from Il Viaggiatore Insonne (The Sleepless Traveler), a late-cycle of poems by Sandro Penna. These works explore the emotional intricacies of intimacy, balancing tenderness and eroticism with the weight of identity and historical context. Roman Pines—the only landscape in the series—depicts two umbrella pines native to Rome and southern Italy, entwined like lovers.
Through diverse material approaches and conceptual sensibilities, the artists in In Quietness and Light weave a landscape not of topography but of inner states—a terrain of reflection where memory, dream, and perception overlap. Each brushstroke and tonal shift marks a quiet encounter between self and the natural world.
