JASON HICKLIN | The River Part II: Cometh Light Boxed Set

Jason Hicklin and Eames Fine Art are delighted to launch The River Part II: Cometh Light boxed set at the Eames Fine Art Collectors' Studio this December. Published as a very small edition of four, this exclusive set brings together twenty-four etchings with poems by four writers invited by Jason to walk the  alongThames with him and join him on his creative journey.

 The River Part II: Cometh Light was an exhibition held at the Eames Fine Art Gallery earlier this year. Whilst the show was in some ways a continuation of The River Part I  (2021) and a return to the Thames and its immediate environs, it is by no means a re-treading of old ground. The city itself, in its perpetual state of decay and regeneration, has, of course, changed over the years, but to anyone familiar with Jason's previous London work, it is the development and refinement of the artist's image-making that strikes us as the most dramatic difference.

As always with Jason, this body of work is at heart an interrogation of light: how it plays upon the surface of the water; dazzles off the edges of the increasingly abstract additions to the cityscape; permeates, shapes and colours the sky. Whereas previous preparatory walks were undertaken during the bleakness of winter, those from which this exhibition was generated took place in the spring. The most obvious upshot of this is that the images are less dark, the sky less foreboding – but more than that, they are, in their depiction of light, more subtle. As Jason’s repertoire of mark-making has expanded, his juxtapositions of those marks has become more understated, so that while water, building and cloud are all rendered with discrete textures, the balance is so fine as to never threaten the cohesion of the view.