Angelina Davis at Oxmarket Contemporary

Coming Up for Air, until May 22

You might call Angelina Davis a landscape painter, but that doesn’t get halfway there, because the scenes she depicts are consciously stylised, and presented in overlapping layers, like a 3D collage: the jumbled perspective she builds up makes you feel like you’re peering into a puppet show, or a large-scale model of a Ballet-Russe set. Maybe a ‘stage-scape painter’ might be more accurate. Maybe.

She calls her oil paintings ‘self-contained worlds in which there is ambiguity, artifice and the possibility of things just out of view’. There’s a palpable sense of drama to them, but never any human figures, so you don’t know whether the play is already over, or hasn’t yet begun. 

Oh, and she’s synaesthetic: she thinks and counts and reads in colours, and learnt early in her career to inhabit her canvases with objects described in a playful, unorthodox palette, each hue and shade dripping with personal significance.

There’s a hint of Nash in her work, and a dash of Dali, but – I don’t think I’m imagining this – perhaps a splash of Hanna & Barbera, too. Or is it Dr Seuss?

Since director Andrew Churchill took over at the Oxmarket Gallery in Chichester, the exhibitions have taken an exciting turn, and this show is no exception. It is displayed alongside the work of the late Chichester artist Anthony Guy, who never showed his art in public in his lifetime.

oxmarket.org