Roantree x Kummattummal

Chris Roantree graduated from the Royal College in 2002, where he specialised in etching. Since then he has won numerous awards and teaches etching at the renowned City & Guilds of London Art School print room. He has exhibited internationally and undertaken residencies in Paris and Central America where his sculptural work resides in a Land art park on the boarder of Guatemala.

Akarsh Kummattummal is a successful artist whose career has spanned advertising and concept art, and is currently working as an Art Director for ground breaking video games company.

The prints are a parallel world of imagined events and places where the fundamental laws of the sublime and the beautiful that permeate centuries of art and have intrigued audiences throughout, are set. This love affair with the natural world, landscape and human histories, represented as statues or mythological creatures, collide with dramatic, sometimes playful undertones seen in the films of emerging cinema technologies, games and even comic books.  Rewilding and a world of potential human obsolescence are played out and evoked in a continuous unraveling narrative. Not only are we looking at the idea of Rewilding in the ecological sense but also a psychological inner/human Rewilding. A theme so very relevant to today but stemming from catalysts and events dating back thousands of years. This continuous collaboration allows us to venture into a visual realm that is unique to collaborations. Interests and passions for making are condensed onto the plate, the space is carefully negotiated over periods of time until the right pitch, tone and feel presents itself in the marks. The work collides traditional etching together with monotypes and intense drawing, where the work is firmly rooted. Finally printed from the plate in the intaglio tradition.