Halsey McKay is pleased to present Panorama, a new exhibition of paintings by Steven Cox. This is the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery.
Cox’s paintings are built rather than composed. Over more than a decade he has developed a method in which thick deposits of oil paint are pressed onto canvas through sheets of plastic, the surface becoming less a support for image than a site of accumulation, resistance and record. Each layer carries the evidence of pressure, displacement and transformation long after the gesture that produced it has gone. Working at scale, the paintings in Panorama each measure two metres across, and colour is the first thing that arrives: acid yellows, deep blues, violent reds pushed into the canvas and forced back up through subsequent layers.
The paintings draw their visual logic from topography, not landscape as subject but terrain as structural principle. They hold within them the compressed strata of geological cross-section and the scarred, accreted texture of surfaces made, unmade and remade over time. Seen from across a room they read as vast chromatic fields; approached closely they reveal a physical density that connects
Cox’s practice to the concerns of Arte Povera, where the material fact of a substance, its weight, resistance and history, carries meaning independent of any representational function. “In my paintings I try to capture the essence of a surface seen outside. Peeling paint, damaged walls, rough textures. I want to poetically reinterpret those surfaces.”
The paintings are also chromatic objects, and it is here that the dialogue with Colour Field painting becomes felt. Where Rothko, Frankenthaler and Noland sought to dissolve the boundary between colour and surface, to make pigment an atmospheric rather than physical presence, Cox reverses the proposition. Colour in these works is inseparable from the material conditions of its making, arriving already compressed, already carrying the evidence of force. The luminosity is earned through accumulation rather than transparency. The exhibition title captures something of this: Panorama suggests both the sweep of a viewed landscape and the immersive experience of standing before these paintings in the room.
Punk and grunge aesthetics are returning not as nostalgia but as pushback, raw surfaces and layered physical complexity asserting themselves against the weightlessness of the screen. Cox’s practice, rooted in physical encounter and material uncertainty for more than a decade, belongs within this shift not as reaction but as sustained investigation.
What the process ultimately refuses is resolution. The plastic intermediary simultaneously extends and displaces the act of painting, translating gestures before they arrive at the surface and admitting the unforeseen. The resulting works accumulate, compress and open back up, surface becoming both image and document, an active field still dense with the pressures, decisions and accidents that made it.
Steven Cox, born 1986 in Aberdeen, received his BA from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and his MA from Edinburgh College of Art. He has had multiple international solo exhibitions, group exhibitions as well as residencies. Cox has been featured, reviewed and profiled in Modern Painters Magazine, ArtNews, ArtInfo, WallStreet International, and Dust Magazine, among others. The artist lives and works in Edinburgh.
