A Room With A View of the Ocean (2017)

A Room With A View of the Ocean
Zagreb, Croatia (Lauba Art House)
29 June – 20 August 2017

Following a survey exhibition at the Gallery at the Canada Embassy in Trafalgar Square, London, Andrew Salgado and Beers London announced a huge solo show in Croatia, entitled A Room With a View of The Ocean, which was as much a bold leap into conceptual art as it is a firm reminder of his prowess and skill as one of the UK’s leading young figurative painters.

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
– Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

A Room With a View of the Ocean has enabled him to undertake a more playful and abstract approach. Capitalizing on Lauba’s 13,000sqft space, the narrative includes nearly 70 individual artworks, created over seven months, including a variety of site-specific installations. The resulting installation is a slightly hallucinogenic, immersive multimedia landscape, complete with furniture, video projection, and ethereal soundscapes. The wotks include textile-art, including hand-dyed, and hand-stitched canvas as a structural and formative technique. Salgado is fascinated with how we experience and interact with something tangible and emotive. As our desire for provenance and knowledge increases, immersion becomes a physical connection between real and imagined worlds.

Salgago presented works on paper as well as sculpture and furniture, namely  a “lemon-yellow patchwork sofa”. In the penultimate room, Salgado has painted 24 individual copies Albert Camus’ seminal novel The Outsider, a book which itself has two titles and lends itself to conflicting political transatlantic interpretations. Perhaps most interesting is the recreation of ‘an ocean’, complete with artificial beach and sun-loungers, as well as an 8metre projection of the ocean, created off the Western Cape of South Africa. A Room with a View of the Ocean challenges our expectations of figurative art and also what we come to expect from a single body of work by an artist. “It’s simple really,” he says, “I want them to feel like they’re inside the work.”