Hobie Porter: Mountain Shadow

Hobie Porter’s virtuosic paintings weave together personal history with sensitive and sublime visions of the landscape. Rendered with microscopic clarity, they speak of an essential yet elusive harmony between nature and culture.

In Porter’s new collection, ‘Mountain Shadow’, sweeping panoramic landscapes pay homage to the mountains and escarpments of the artist’s lifelong home in the Tweed Valley. Working with drone technology, a new aerial perspective sifts these familiar landscapes through an unfamiliar lens as Porter engages with the Freudian theory of the uncanny ¬– where heimlich courts the unheimlich and reality dances with dreams. The drone, as both trope and tool, allows the artist to wilfully remove himself from reality, elevating his paintings into a disorienting, ethereal space. Notable here is a divergence from the floating object paintings for which Porter is known; the drone itself becomes the floating object, summoning a new perspective spatially and conceptually.

Porter’s paintings address the sublime through a cinematic visual language. The epic widescreen panoramas in ‘Mountain Shadow’ see alpine trees illuminated with crisp, graphic light, sharpening the edges of forms and creating a sense of high definition. Porter’s meticulous trompe l’oeil conjures a kind of augmented reality beyond the painterly ¬¬– veering into the hyperreal. Meanwhile, the perspectival shift into high drone territory creates, for the first time, a tacit tone of science fiction. It’s a fascinating marriage of sublimity, scientism and hyperreality, destabilising the viewer as feelings of awe collide with cinematic sci-fi and the uncanniness of Porter’s photorealism