Jake Grewal, Under the Same Sky, Studio Voltaire by Sue Hubbard
Image credit: Jake Grewal, Under the Same Sky, 2025. Installation view at Studio Voltaire. Images courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire. Credit Sarah Rainer.
In Berlin in the 1800s the philosopher Schopenhauer constructed a metaphysical vision in which art was given a uniquely important position. Through art alone, he suggested, it was possible to achieve release from the endless cycle of desire and suffering inherent within the human condition. The artist was perceived as a genius, with an ability to reach beyond the daily grind. In France, Britain and America, Romanticism asserted itself to have far reaching artistic, social and political consequences. From the poetry of the Lakeland poets to compositions by Brahms, and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, even the French Revolution, the individual and ‘his’ emotions were central. God was losing his grip on the human imagination and untamed nature provided an alternative experience of awe and ‘otherness.’ A reaction against the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism emphasised the importance of personal emotion. Goethe spoke of Beauty as ‘ a gentle and elevated harmony pervading everything which immediately pleases without requiring cognition or reflection.” This miasma of fuzzy feelings was to define mainstream ideas about beauty in western art until the beginning of the 20th century.
Fast forward through several economic depressions and two World Wars, during which civilisation went through a number of other ‘isms’: Futurism, Existentialism, Communism, Capitalism and Postmodernism, to name but a few – all responses to the shifting tectonic plates of political and social change. The death of God and the collapse of faith led to a state of edgy anxiety. From Modernism onwards, it felt as though society was built of shifting sands, that centres rarely hold. So, what are we to make of a young painter, Jake Grewal (born in 1994), who embraces the retro tropes and language of Romanticism, tinging it with a contemporary queer gaze?
Entering the gallery of this, his first institutional exhibition in London, we are confronted by an ambitious concave painted panorama. The effect is reminiscent of those 1960s Cineramas that projected images simultaneously from three projectors onto a huge, curved screen. The paint is luminous. We are presented with a prelapsarian world of blue skies tinged with pink clouds. Boyish figures clamber, naked, over rocks in this nameless arcadian idyll where everything is bathed in the fuzzy golden glow of dawn. Here, Lord of the Flies and the landscapes of German painter Lovis Corinth meet contemporary gay imagery. Elsewhere, a single, male nude (his face a blur) stands on a beach of pink sand, washed by a ribbon of blue sea. This, surely, must be a nod to Picasso’s rose period painting of 1905, Boy Leading a Horse. The isolated figure inhabits the same position on the canvas, his body similarly twisted to his right, only, this time, without a horse.
For the commission at Studio Voltaire, Grewal spent a long time in India travelling through southern Goa, Kerala; the northern cities of Varanasi, Amritsar and Delhi, and the mountainous area of Pradesh. Several of the landscapes shown here are devoid of figures. In the triptych Trustlands, we’re presented with a rugged headland that looks across a bay to a pinnacle of rock lost in blanket of cloud. Without buildings, vegetation or people, this might be the edge of the world, some far-flung shore untouched by human habitation or disruption. A pristine environment before the Fall?
A month in Porthmeor Studios, St. Ives, as a resident of Studio 5, following in the footsteps of the painters Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron, lead to a number of new seascapes. Zennor, a small painting named after the village set in that area of outstanding natural beauty, where D.H. Lawrence lived with his German wife Frieda, shows rocks, just below the waves, washed by the luminous, translucent light of the Gulf Stream that gives this part of Cornwall its particular radiance. There’s something meditative about this little painting. You can almost hear the constant lap of the waves.
In several larger works, otherworldly figures recede into the rock formations so it’s not always clear whether Grewal is depicting individuals or ghostly afterimages that linger on the retina. Falling Rocket 2025, with its brooding sky and yellow light spilling in a honeyed pathway across the sea seems to connect its lone figure with the heavens in this, his most ostensibly Romantic painting. Poised against the smudges and swirls of paint, the figure’s back to the viewer, (a reference to Caspar David Friederich?) he stands on one leg, as if about to plunge into the golden pool in front of him, lured by its shimmer and glow. It’s a powerfully mysterious painting. Radiant light, has through the history of western art, indicated the divine. Though, here, whether, that’s from some pagan or a Christian divinity, it’s impossible to say. What it does suggest, is an element of yearning; the emotion that sits centrally within Romanticism, colouring it with a sense of longing for some lost ineffable Eden.
Image credit: Jake Grewal, Under the Same Sky, 2025. Installation view at Studio Voltaire. Images courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire. Credit Sarah Rainer.