Charlie Lewis Marffy is interested in painting that is true to the experience of living, breathing and failing. In his paintings, Lewis Marffy seems to offer glimpses into a subliminal world; a place that is rife with confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity. It is conjured through an intuitive immediacy that incorporates its afflictions and derailments into something psychologically challenging. A peculiar darkness is slowly unveiled under the veneer of a ludic sensibility. It is an unfamiliar non-representational space that provokes the imagination with the indication of something internal and personal. The viewer, much like the painter, is invited to navigate the painting as a mental map in the same way an orienteer would. The divergent actualisations, absence of clear horizontal lines and spiralling overlapping forms work in the same way that a cartographer does when he flattens the earth’s surface onto paper. A strong example of this is the work Those Catchers Can’t Catch wherein superfluous details have been removed so that there is significant variation in how things are depicted and only vital information remains.   

Viewers should not be expected to be faced with clear messages that meet our expectations. Instead, they may be left mistrustful and uncertain of their thoughts, desires and interpretations. In viewing the painting as a metaphor for the title – No Man’s Land, one sees the series operate as an allegory, capturing a feeling of attachment. A disconnection from the world, from others and perhaps even ourselves. It enables us to bring our own associations and disassociations to his paintings. They work on a purely connotative and subjective level of interpretation. The visual language somehow assimilates a wide range of content. Lewis Marffy’s paintings invite our minds to sink and drift with purpose through a myriad of referential relations. All can be interpreted continuously within differing contextures. The spatial syntaxes are entirely devised from Lewis Marffy’s imagination and register as extensions of a diagram that can pose impossible things and invisible forces into perfectly plausible vectors.    

It is a concoction of feudal architecture, citations of crude realities, semi-abstract cartographic forms and suggestions of gesture. These different components, delivered in a wide-ranging rich palette from electric green to a weathered mustard yellow are seen effectively in the works A Balloon Trip that Rearranges Misconceptions and There Is a Leak in the Boiler Room. The works present as disordered, seemingly uninhabitable spaces – the forms structurally paradoxical. It is a compilation of the indefinable that reaches implausibly at depicting the intangible. We are never quite sure what we are viewing, the possibilities seemingly endless. It seems a process of engaging in a rambling, internal discourse, his abstractions negotiating a space of ideas and feelings. It is making sense of an imagined space, a considered assembling of disparate fragments into a fragile whole.