ALEX LOWERY’s stunning new paintings of Portland and West Bay return to familiar places with new eyes. Looking over rooftops towards the sweeping coastline of Lyme Bay and the sea, with Portland misty in the distance, our eyes are drawn to planes of colour and light. Unpeopled, but full of the evidence of people, these paintings hold our attention in play. They take the eye around and through the image, from foreground to background, from rough foliage and angled surfaces to luminous seas and sky, from the contemporary to the timeless and from the concrete to the infinite.

Moving back and forth in the space between naturalism and abstraction, Alex Lowery’s paintings seduce us with texture and light. Whether it is the cliffs of West Bay and the rooftops around Pier Terrace, the road that rides the ridge of Portland or indeed L’Estaque near Marseille, he finds the beauty in light on tarmac, in corrugated iron and chimney pots in these seaside places. His compositions often lead us through a nexus of buildings whose details may be more or less abstracted. Ways through down to the beach are implied. Buildings may or may not look back at us through their windows. Unusual colours may be more accurate than we have noticed. Sometimes it takes seeing an Alex Lowery painting to realise how things actually look.