Scene XXI: Theodore Ereira-Guyer

Matt Carey-Williams, London and Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, October 2026

Dear Ann, wherever you are
Since you lately learnt to die,
You are this unsetting star
That shines unchanged in my eye;
So near, inaccessible,
Absent and present so much
Since out of the world you fell,
Fell from hearing and touch –
So near. But your mortal tongue
Used for immortal use,
The grace of a woman young,
The air of an early muse,
The wealth of thew chambered brow
And soaring light of your eyes;
These are no longer now.
Death has a princely prize.

—Edwin Muir, For Ann Scott-Moncrieff (1914–1943) (1943, first stanza)

“What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.”

—George Oppen, on growing old, as recalled by Anthony Rudolf (n.d.)

I: THEY SLEEP IN THE MOUNTAINS

Mountains keep their counsel. They shoulder the sky, conduct the weather and assume a magnificent, aristocratic indifference to the brief, breathless business of being human. We climb them; name them; document them and occasionally persuade ourselves that we have conquered them. Yet beneath this apparent immutability, everything moves. Rocks fracture as water worries its way through stone. The mountain’s monumental repose tries to conceal yet still cannot help but whisper the incessant, inevitable rehearsal of its own evanescence. Theodore Ereira-Guyer gives such distinction a body. His mountains coil in lavender folds, their flanks interrupted by chalky abrasions and ochre wounds. His woods gather up blues, greens and Bordeaux reds into thickets of shade through which recognition - challenged to and undertaken by his viewer - must pick its way. Elsewhere, water floods across enormous horizontal fields, a pale ripple briefly delivering something from the dark. These landscapes carry the evidence of their own disturbance, reminding us that their stillness has been hard won.

Ereira-Guyer’s practice offers a foraging of printmaking, sculpture and installation as disciplines to forge a new dialect of painting. Metal plates are scratched and scarred with acid; ink, plaster and pressure carry their marks onto paper; further translations bring etched imagery into plaster and cement. Paper laid on canvas preserves another branch of this material genealogy. Across all these supports, the artist’s image conveys the most subtle, haunting yet telling efflorescence of presence through the changing fidelity of its passage. A lost connection becomes an opening. Damage finds a voice. Accident leads the way. Within the mountain something slumbers, but it is something which is about to awaken.

In the Mountains’ Slumber lay Doubt and Desire is an exhibition that locates two uneasy companions inside this exchange between fixity and fracture; the prose and poesy of both Image and Index. Doubt quizzes what has survived; desire persuades us to keep looking. Edwin Muir addresses a young friend whose untimely death has made them inaccessible. George Oppen discovers the astonished child still lodged inside an ageing life. Both observe a presence that persists through (and despite) profound alteration, giving life to surfaces where steadfastness is made tangible, but where memory is subsequently shaped as a crag to cling on to as we attempt to climb the mountains of matter, myth and meaning as unveiled by Ereira-Guyer, all the while knowing such a journey through such disciplinary, material and even narratological flux remains beautifully antagonised, with its coveted destination of understanding, likewise, exquisitely elusive.

II: THE NATURE OF MYTH; THE MYTH OF NATURE

Nature shapes the earthly mountain. Myth veils it with a mantilla of divinity. A wooded slope acquires the anxiety of pursuit; a cave shelters a sleeping beloved. Greek mythology offers Ereira-Guyer’s ‘scapes of land, sea and air a triggering companionship, its transformations bringing desire into intimate conversation with his own manipulations of media. Here, too, metamorphosis can also be a condition of remaining; the conundrum of variation being both the question and answer of a yearned-for balance or symmetry of means, media, manner and making.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Angel and the mountains, 2025-2026, Etching on paper laid canvas, charcoal, beeswax, lamp-black pigment, 128 x 181 cm (50 3/8 x 71 1/4 in)

In Angel and the mountains (2025-26), a winged figure sweeps horizontally above a sharply corrugated range. Their head inclines at the upper right as wings unfurl themselves across the upper field, their feathered contours caught within a flickering cream and olive dusk. Below, mountain ridges huddle into obsidian pleats. Flight and geology seem to exchange anatomies: wings propose as striations of rock, whilst slopes acquire the restless folds of antique drapery. Charcoal, beeswax and lamp-black pigment deepen the etched image’s nocturnal murmuration so that figure and ground announce themselves (and their nexus) with the muscular yet phantasmal voice of German Expressionism. The angel is visible, however, what their arrival promises remains ambiguous. Angels exist in any number of mythologies, signifying rescue, release and even retribution. Some of that innate darkness bleeds out in the surface’s heavier, atramentous tonality, discombobulating any sought-after contradistinction between the angel and the shadowy mountain they swoop over, between a significance between light and dark; between terrestrial permanence and celestial condensation. We may turn to the twins Hypnos and Thanatos – paragons of sleep and death - to seek some poignancy, if not resolution from this suspended encounter. Both acts propose a withdrawal from consciousness, though only one ordinarily permits return. Selene’s love for Endymion takes that uncertainty into the mountains of Caria: in one account, he sleeps eternally on Mount Latmos, his (now) immortal youth preserved for Selene by Zeus at the expense of his cognisant, active life. The flight of desire obtains permanence only as it simultaneously discovers its horrifying limitation, amplified by the huge mountain in which Endymion sleeps forever.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Under the eyelid of slumber, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 80 cm (23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, And still the bees thought the hot days would never cease, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 90 cm (23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Under the eyelid of slumber, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 80 cm (23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, And still the bees thought the hot days would never cease, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 90 cm (23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in)

Under the eyelid of slumber (2025-26) shifts that tension between fancy and fallibility into a maroon-red woodland. Wine and russet tones crowd the surface; trunks twist upwards, leaning and coiling across and around one another like tornados, allowing small, pale apertures to puncture their enclosures. Sweeping marks collect along the bottom like a threshold we have yet to cross. The eyelid of the title lends this wooded copse an aching introspection. We might be entering a landscape or a more abstracted obscurity that only passes across the eye as one slowly drifts into sleep. Red is here warm enough to promise shelter but dense enough to make that shelter feel possessive. The stuff of dreams; the stuff of faerie tales. And still the bees thought the hot days would never cease (2025-26) exchanges those circumambient trunks for a more dispersed, botanical abundance. Purple-blue stems, curling leaves and petal-like forms spread across a warm ochre and burnished ground, their broken pale outlines interrupted by mint-green flickers. No bee needs to announce itself: one can almost feel its buzzy flight tracked and traced across the surface. The tangle gives the title its sense of life absorbed in continuance. Its echo of John Keats’s To Autumn (1819) carries seasonal change into this busy plenitude whilst Ovid’s tale of Daphne’s metamorphosis into laurel offers another resonance, where foliage shelters a life by changing its terms. Nature thus receives the blessing of our myths without ever surrendering its own material strangeness; its own earthly form of magic.

III: SPACE FLOWS INTO PLACE

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, The tangled thread falls slack, 2025-2026, Etching on paper laid canvas, walnut frame, 154 x 304 cm (60 5/8 x 119 3/4 in)

The three large works, each titled The tangled thread falls slack (2025-26) to loosely form a triptych, stretch a comparable uncertainty across an extraordinary breadth. Their proportions invite a panoramic command which their surfaces quietly withhold. Water offers movement everywhere yet no destination. The eye must learn to navigate without the reassurance of a shore; it must find succour in both fluctuation and tribulation. A blue-green version offers a cooler central expanse hanging between murkier olive margins. Low, wavering marks are absorbed into its tonal matrix, so that the image seems to withhold its own distances. The surface evinces a body of water whilst resisting its division into manageable, digestible parts. Depth begins somewhere beneath the next mark, perhaps, yet that ‘somewhere’ sits beneath our wish to discover or manipulate it. Ereira-Guyer thus reminds us that life is but one long attempt to control its flow, knowing that the easiest way to live through it is just to go with the flow.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, The tangled thread falls slack, 2025-2026, Etching on paper laid canvas, walnut frame, 154 x 304 cm (60 5/8 x 119 3/4 in)

A more emphatically blue version betrays a field crossed by successive pale undulations. Here, ripples thicken into bands, then loosen around spectral fish, including a conspicuous pale body below the centre of the composition. Recognition arrives as a local event inside a much larger uncertainty. We identify the fish, yet its watery whereabouts remain ineluctable, with its furfuraceous form apparently belonging as much to the rippling marks as to whatever sulks beneath them. The third version tends towards a more blue-black palette. Pale rivulets now become more isolated; fish emerge through the gloom, their eyes and scaled bodies briefly gathering definition before the surrounding darkness takes them back. A brighter passage towards the right pulls the eye laterally, whilst dimmer intervals interrupt its progress. Compared with the accumulating blue or green rhythms of the other two canvases, this version unfurls a more reluctant disclosure. Looking now begins to resemble waiting for one’s sight to adjust at night. Optics seek desire yet are addled by doubt. Ariadne’s thread promises an escape from this aqueous labyrinth. These works make their shared title’s slackening thread a tender predicament: connection persists after guidance has become uncertain. As we move between them, the exhibition functions as a Greek chorus, distinct voices deepening a shared condition. Installation enters painting through that bodily negotiation of scale and distance. Space becomes place through the time and attention we give it; the place we leave carries something of our prior observation and thus communion with it.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, The tangled thread falls slack, 2025-2026, Etching on paper laid canvas, walnut frame, 154 x 304 cm (60 5/8 x 119 3/4 in)

IV: DANCING WITH CHRONOS AND KAIROS

Time gets under Ereira-Guyer’s skin. Under the quick of his images, certainly, where successive procedures accumulate into surfaces weathered by their own emergence. A work can take a year or so to arrive. Chronos offers a name for duration and succession; Kairos emphasises the opportune moment, when an intervention becomes possible or decisive. Both belong to the artist’s practice and, especially, to his craft: the long unfolding of a process and judgement which allows (indeed, encourages) the unforeseen and their consequences to remain.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, The oozing hours, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 90 cm (23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in)

The oozing hours (2025-26) makes duration almost viscous. Teal-grey trunks rise through a field of ochre exposures and bruised plum patches; branches extend sideways across the composition, repeatedly catching the eye. At the upper right, a large pale, drooping phylloid form curls into darker growth. Below, fine vertical streaks descend towards the base, making the woodland appear to seep through its own image and vortex. The hours (of the subject’s exposure and the object’s conception and fabrication) have now acquired a consistency; they gather on the branches and run down the surface. The uneven upper edge makes that sensation physical, so that this is a landscape with a body and one that functions like a body, its chipped, layered boundary declaring the substance through which the image has travelled. What seems atmospheric at a distance becomes granular at close quarters. Time changes registers with our proximity: a wooded dusk becomes a history of contact, pressure and partial release.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, As the heart grows older, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and, pigment, 60 x 90 cm (23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in)

As the heart grows older (2025-26) invests the flow and flux of duration with another dimension. Lavender mountains gather across the middle, their ribbed slopes descending into broad, curling foreground folds. Above them, a cream and buff sky is raked with blue-grey interruptions and tiny cobalt cuts as warm ochre catches in the broken surface. The mountains seem soft enough to have been folded, yet their colour is continually fretted by abrasion. Age enters through that coexistence of tenderness and corrosion. Something holds its shape by (ironically) carrying everything that has happened to it. Oppen’s little boy belongs in these older mountains, dancing with Chronos and Kairos. Inward continuity encounters an exterior which keeps accumulating evidence to the contrary. Mnemosyne - memory personified - might recognise such an arrangement. Ereira-Guyer’s transfers thus give recollection a material analogy: an image passes into another state, preserving some connections whilst remaking others. Suddenly, a ridge becomes legible, or a branch separates from shadow. Figural form finds itself in arabesques of abstraction like Kairos finds their opportunity inside Chronos’s slow weather.

V: SLOW CHANGE, SNOW CHANGE

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Snow (the difficulty of knowing), 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, charcoal, cement and pigment 90 x 121 cm (35 3/8 x 47 5/8 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Snow (Each mortal thing does one thing and the same), 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 90 x 121 cm (35 3/8 x 47 5/8 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Snow (the difficulty of knowing), 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, charcoal, cement and pigment 90 x 121 cm (35 3/8 x 47 5/8 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Snow (Each mortal thing does one thing and the same), 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 90 x 121 cm (35 3/8 x 47 5/8 in)

Snow appears to muffle the prosaic totality of topography yet Ereira-Guyer makes that hush extraordinarily active. In Snow (the difficulty of knowing) (2025-26), pale lavender terrain rises diagonally from the lower left towards the highest peak at the upper right. Curling slopes and troughs gather beneath it, whilst much of the upper left opens into mottled chalk-white and buff, peppered with dark flecks. The composition is pulled between an ascending mass and an atmosphere which threatens to disperse it. Snow clarifies the ridge through an act of concealment. Snow (Each mortal thing does one thing and the same) (2025-26) is differently poised. A broad foreground mountain rises from the lower centre towards a ridge running across the middle; above it, the pale grey sky opens into flatter swipes quivering like faint vertical ghosts. Dense striations articulate the slopes, with cream exposures, thin blue seams and occasional ochre interruptions refusing a seamless whiteness. Where the other Snow work climbs steeply across its field, this one presses forwards, bringing its enormous, pale flank ever closer to the viewer. Both works are made up of plaster, chalk, charcoal, cement and pigment. Their apparent weather(ing) lives inside a mineral construction whose edges expose accumulated layers. Geology thus becomes a kind of phenomenology: the conditions of the image’s appearance entering what we understand it to be. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line from his sonnet, As Kingfishers Catch Fire (1877), recalled by the second Snow version’s subtitle, gives identity an active principle. Here a mountain becomes itself through marks which have already changed support, density and disposition. Its persistence includes its departures whilst its purpose chimes with the media used to articulate it.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Deeper than divined (Burning place), 2025, Bronze, 60 x 38 x 27.5 cm (23 5/8 x 15 x 10 7/8 in)

Deeper than divined (Burning place) (2026) carries that paradox into bronze. Four tall uprights, encrusted with small seed-like and pod-like forms, surround an open framework. Parallel strands loop over its rails and sag into a shallow sling. Their arrested flexibility is disarming: metal remembers the behaviour of something yielding. The structure might suggest a bed, cradle or hearth, each association making absence palpable within its open centre. Warm bronze preserves both the roughness of clustered growth and the delicate repetition of cords. Slumber now acquires an architecture; the title introduces a heat the cooled object can only remember. At Ereira-Guyer’s insistence, sculpture and printmaking enter painting as ways of thinking through resistance. His image has weight. His touch extends from the incision of a plate to the pressure of transfer and the exposed thickness of a panel. Stillness carries an eventful material past, whose consequences continue to move through our arc of looking. The sculpture also introduces the question of habitation. Its rails establish an interior without closing it; its clustered uprights place something organic inside a recognisably constructed order. Civilisation begins, perhaps, with such a modest ambition: somewhere to lay, gather, maintain a little heat. Yet the vacant sling leaves that promise awaiting a body to fulfil it. Ereira-Guyer thus shows us that endurance makes the absent occupant more fleeting – whether the intimated protagonist or the engaged viewer. Bronze may preserve us a bed, but it offers no guarantee as to who will - and can - return to it.

VI: THE CONTEST OF DOUBT AND DESIRE

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Hesitancy, 2025-26, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 90 cm (23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, All I ever wanted from earth, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 90 cm (23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Hesitancy, 2025-26, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 90 cm (23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in)

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, All I ever wanted from earth, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 90 cm (23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in)

Desire leans in. Doubt waits. Hesitancy (2025-26) gives that oxymoron-cum-rendezvous a pale blue, sandy environment. A conical rise at the upper left and a pointed ridge towards the right establish a landscape whose middle dissolves into granular blush, cream and brown interruptions. A dark blue-grey fissure briefly steadies the right-hand slope. Then the surface loosens again. Recognition has footholds, but it must keep moving between them. The title’s uncertainty becomes an experience conducted by the eye. All I ever wanted from earth (2025-26) is more openly supplicant. Pale lilac mountains buckle and stream beneath an earthy copper-brown strip of sky; a pale disc lingers near the upper left, whilst a dark horizontal smear troubles the upper right. The foreground’s convolutions suggest cloth gathered in a lap, or flesh carrying the memory of a fold. Those associations make the title’s longing feel physical, visceral. Earth is both a place and space one might seek for comfort, though its crenelated and pitted surface promises little about how long such comfort might last.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Leavetaking, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, charcoal, cement and pigment, 60 x 80 cm (23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in)

Leavetaking (2026-26) warms the tension between doubt and desire into mauve, rose and terracotta plumes. Yellow-ochre contours trace overlapping slopes, descending ravines and distances which seem to withdraw as we approach. Darker plum passages weight the left middle and lower right; a pale round disc rests low on the left. The landscape’s opalescence complicates our departure from it. Nothing needs to become inhospitable for leaving to sting. Orpheus’s backward glance towards Eurydice offers a mythic companion: desire asks optics to guarantee a presence so that the act of looking becomes inextricably entangled within arcs of loss.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, The fading of doubt and desire, 2025-2026, Etching on plaster, chalk, cement and pigment, 60 x 80 cm (23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in)

The verdant The fading of doubt and desire (2025-26) exchanges these open distances for a dense, green wood. Emerald and teal trunks cross diagonally and rise vertically, allowing thin, pale channels to glister between them. Rust and violet-brown patches interrupt the lower field; branches that bar our route deeper into the picture plane. The title proposes a subsiding of agitation, yet the image remains insistently entangled. Peace has no clear path through this wild field of green. Our desire to enter it survives the doubt that there is anywhere to go. Set beside The oozing hours, green here feels more saturated, its pale openings narrower and more furtive. The earlier wood’s blue-grey intervals allow a certain atmospheric circulation; here, the diagonals tighten the space around us. Such chromatic differences alter the psychology of looking. We can inhabit a shared motif and still experience another climate of attachment, another pressure upon our wish to remain. Or flee.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Deeper than divined, 2026, Bronze, 39 x 29 cm (15 3/8 x 11 3/8 in)

The bronze Deeper than divined (2026) brings withdrawal close to home. Its closed-eyed features are modelled within a curved, bucket-like form, giving the artist’s account of childhood invisibility a corporeal focus: if I cannot see you, perhaps you cannot see me. That ingenious bargain leaves the world inconveniently intact. The inward refuge cannot abolish exposure. Oppen’s astonishment returns, the child’s wish for an unchanging core sheltered inside a body subject to the vagaries and vicissitudes of time. Desire protects that continuity. Doubt knows how vulnerable that shelter is.

VII: A CHANCE TO DREAM

Theodore Ereira-Guyer’s mountains keep changing the terms of their slumber. A lavender ridge ascends; another pale flank advances. Woods coagulate into red enclosures or green entanglements, whilst navy water delivers a fish and quietly reclaims its outline. Each work particularizes uncertainty, locating doubt and desire in a contour, an aperture or a hue whose depth takes time to disclose. In all these works, nothing remains static and it is the artist’s determination for such an ouroboros of transformation - materially, intellectually and conceptually - that nourishes his subject and object. However, it is Ereira-Guyer’s searingly intelligent, experimental craft that gives these encounters their stakes. His image carries the consequences of its passage through matter, with each transfer exposing continuity to alteration. The bronze sling holds its yielding shape, the mineral panels retain their scars, and the great watery expanses keep offering recognition without the certainty of any arrival. Together, they let experience remain unfinished. It is in these mountains – pillars of pattern, presence and pursuit – that the slumber of possibility and transformation lays. It is inside those heated crucibles of conflict and passion that we ask of slumber a moment for repose. A moment to let myth and fancy transform geology into poesy; mountains into myth; Earth into Heaven.

Muir’s absent friend remains someone to whom a poem can speak. Oppen’s little boy persists within the bewildering experience of age. Ereira-Guyer’s complex of ‘scapes likewise offer a comparable intimacy – a chance to dream - with (and of) something we cannot properly recover. In the final analysis, when the dance is over, we leave behind a terrain whose whereabouts remains uncertain - mountains of Nature or human ambition floating in the dreamy slumber of myth and memory - but whose presence still remains tantalizingly close. It has found somewhere to live inside of the artist and, by extension, his viewer, gathering something of the colour and texture, light and shadow of our shared experience. Doubt keeps that place - as space, slumber and artwork - open. Desire brings us back to it, over and over again, giving us one more chance to dwell, dance and dream.

Matt Carey-Williams
London and Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
October – November 2026