Long & Ryle Gallery London
Solo Exhibition
4 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4PX
Opening Times Monday – Friday: 10.00am – 5.30pm : Saturday by appointment (please email gallery@long-and-ryle)
Artfully cavorting upon an imagined classical Roman stage, the characters of Simon Casson’s paintings play out the Ludi Florales, games with a smeary licentiousness, scattering beans and cavorting with hare and deer, such symbols of fertility and abundance, all in the name of the goddess Flora and the festival in her honour, braying to her for botanical protection.
Floral wreaths abound and nudity rules, broken and banded with swathes of colour, juxtaposing the customary white purity. Within the confines of the Circus Maximus farces were wildly acted out, fleshy and overtly sexual. Concubines musing upon the curated memento mori. Stepping over the threshold of normality, phantasmal gladiatorial displays form a backdrop to the cavorting courtesans who fiercely embraced the proceeding as their own.
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