The Blue Period reduces Ian Rayer-Smith's practice to a single chromatic force. Here blue is not simply colour. It is architecture, horizon and pulse. Cobalt and ultramarine are layered, lifted and reworked, light moving through the glazes while drawn marks and erasures hold the surface alive.
The restraint of a single palette sharpens everything within it. Serenity set against mischief, silence against velocity. Hints of the classical remain, but the register is resolutely contemporary, poised between sky and deep water, memory and immediacy.
These are paintings built for long looking. The more time they are given, the more the blue begins to breathe.