Photo by Shantra Hannibal

Amid the multitude of unique art galleries in Buenos Aires, The British Arts Centre is hosting artist Simon Boyd’s latest exhibit, ‘The Jousters’ Banquet’. A pastel-coloured trip down the winding stairs of the gallery exposes a world of knights, fighting roosters, and what perceptions a move from the UK to Argentina can produce.

Educated in painting and video at London’s Middlesex University, Boyd says his move to Argentina changed his art dramatically. “When I first arrived in 2007, my work was exploring ideas of consumption, the seduction of images largely symbolised through sweets.”

This “early” work by Boyd can be seen on the lower level of the gallery, with the most recent work greeting viewers as they enter the somewhat uncomfortable gallery. All of the work is, indeed, colourful, which can prompt the viewer to pass from one work to the next too quickly. Downstairs, bright pinks and purples surround a floral cut-out shape where a scene of geometric and human shapes commands the viewer sneak fearfully close to touching the painting in order get a look at what exactly is happening.

‘Uprising’ is a mess of colour with, at first, the only distinguishable character being the head of a buck. The confusion of shapes in the pastel colours draws the viewer to sidle up to the painting to make sense of what appears from a distance to be chaos. For this very standard reaction, the viewer is rewarded with the appearance of not only deer, but soldiers turned on their heads, human faces, and a mass of details unnoticed from a distance.

Photo by Shantra Hannibal

Boyd says his latest fascination with knights is “a throwback to my imagination as a child” and going to museums with his mother to see the work of Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood painters like John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse.

“As I began to identify increasingly more with the Pre-Raphaelites while living in Argentina, I began to understand more comprehensively my identity as a British painter. I am pursuing in my paintings the same archaic, romantic and moralistic ideals that motivated these Victorian painters. A similar nostalgic yearning for the past, a past that one was never acquainted with but which has been construed through hearsay and fables. This nostalgia of the past, the romance and glamour of knights, as baseless as it seems, offers a good counterbalance to today’s issues; a sort of escapism if you like from today’s ‘brave new world’.”

Boyd, born and raised in London and educated in painting and video from Middlesex University, has lived in Argentina since 2007. He resides in Toay, La Pampa, with his wife and two children. His work will be on display in the British Arts Centre, Suipacha 1333 until 27th November. More information at www.britishartscentre.org.ar.