MFA, Slade, 2009
Ed Saye is an important visionary artist – attuned to the collective unconscious with almost prophetic sensitivity. His work has evolved with rare coherence since graduating in 2009. Figures moving through liminal light – half asleep or wide awake – new dawn or an apocalypse? Players caught between scripts. The colour hums between reverence and recoding, hyperreal, radiant – the saturation turned just past natural, where pigment behaves as energy. Studio In View Award winner 2022.
I make paintings of hippie-like dudes doing everyday things. These dramatic, fantasy scenarios, with highly saturated colours and dramatic light, are inspired as much by high art as videogame culture. The figures – mid-swing, mid-drink, idle – inhabit dreamy, fragmented worlds. They keep going, even when the meaning of what they're doing has thinned or disappeared. I'm interested in that persistence.