Carousel 2016

Joshua Flint made this painting, Carousel, using loose brushwork and a muted palette that gives it an ethereal, dreamlike quality. There's a real sense of layering here, both in terms of the composition and the paint itself. Flint isn't afraid to let the surface show through, creating areas of transparency that contrast with the thicker, more opaque passages. Look at the way he's rendered the figures on the stairs – they seem to dissolve into the background, almost like ghosts. And then there's that chair in the foreground, solid and present, with a tiny crown that hints at something deeper. It's this push and pull between abstraction and representation that makes the painting so compelling. The ambiguous space reminds me of some of the dreamlike scenes in Neo Rauch’s work, where figures and objects seem to float in a space outside of time. Flint, like Rauch, invites us to get lost in the ambiguity, to embrace the multiplicity of meaning, and to find our own way through the labyrinth of the image.