Allan Forsyth: Vivid Light, Gallery Elena Shchukina

Brace yourself for a burst of solar-plexus-striking colour to tear through the grey winter days this month. Mayfair’s Gallery Elena Shcukina hosts Vivid Light: an exhibition of trippy analogue/digital still-life images by Scottish photomanipulator Allan Forsyth, and a technicolour homage to the drama of the natural world.

Forsyth’s work captures flora, fauna and minerals from rampant electric blue macaws, smatterings of butterflies on blossom sprays, and exquisite floral close-ups in saturated shades of mauve. They’re photographs, digitally enhanced with elements of computer generated imagery, but for all their cutting-edge nuance they are compositionally simple in a way that recalls the early naturalistic still-lives of the Dutch Masters. 

His series of bisected flowers steals the show for us. Forsyth’s camera homes in on the internal structures of these organs with an unflinching concentration, while in the background exotic tousled petals flail in a tense kind of suspended animation. High natural drama indeed. It’s easy to see why special commissions from this series adorn Mayfair’s highest-falutin walls: from Gordon Ramsay’s Maze Restaurant to Kelly Hoppen Interiors and the Grosvenor House Hotel. Gallery Elena Shcukina, with its curious curatorial foible of bringing high art together with furniture and objets d’art in a holistic lived-in space, recreates the images’ effect on these interior spaces.