Ache the Good Ache: Alasdair Wallace

Scottish painter Alasdair Wallace's richly-layered work is suffused with the surrealism of the everyday, portraying worlds filled with odd juxtapositions. Painting urban fringes, his parklands and skylines initially seem familiar. And yet, through unexpected details, each setting becomes a dreamscape as much as a landscape. 

His latest exhibition is resonant with echoes of Poussin and Claude, with towering sylvan glades and forest edgelands a prominent motif. And yet, interspersed with Wallace's familiar props - drum kits, gliders, axes, saws, rainbow pie-charts, shopping bags, cutlery in puddles - each scene cannot simply be read as an arcadia. The ideal landscape is made strange, cluttered with contemporary accessories. Wallace has also incorporated a graphic element, the most enchanted of copses inscribed with modern idioms. Working on an unprecedented scale, and introducing paper as a surface, Wallace finds room for his artistic imagination in the spaces in between urbanity and full retreat.

Wallace exhibits regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy. His work was included in the major survey show of Scottish painting at the Fleming Collection gallery in London in 2009. Last year, Wallace participated in the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour's annual show, where he was awarded two prizes, the House for an Art Lover Prize and the Walter Scott Prize.

The exhibition has been supported by the Bet Low Trust.