Sunday Salon 41

The curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-objective and reductive artists working in the UK

James Campion

Saturation Point Sunday Salon 41

14 June 2026

This exhibition brings together four paintings made between 2016 and 2026. Although their sources range from shop-front windows to art-historical paintings and bath towels, all begin with pre-existing visual structures that are translated, adapted and re-imagined through paint.

Meridian Pharmacy (2016) emerged from a series based on windows and doors. Drawn from everyday architecture, these works focused on overlooked arrangements of frames, grilles and divisions that possessed an unexpected visual complexity. Certain elements of the original structures, such as scale and compositional layout, were retained, while others were altered through colour, simplification and material transformation. The resulting paintings occupy an ambiguous space: they can appear graphic and precise, yet remain rooted in the physical qualities of paint. Although derived from ordinary urban details, they also generate unintended echoes of art history, from gilded altarpieces and frames to the layered geometries of Cubism and the internal framing devices of colour-field painting.

After Mondrian (2019) made these connections explicit. Part of a series that used historical artworks as source material, the painting takes the compositional framework of Mondrian's Lozenge Composition with Two Lines as its starting point while departing from it in colour, scale and execution. Muted references to Mondrian's primary palette replace the monochrome original, while a more painterly approach emerges through softer edges and visible surface texture. The work also marked a shift in process, moving away from fully predetermined designs towards a more iterative method in which decisions evolve during painting.

The two recent towel paintings (2026) continue this exploration from an unexpected direction. Based on commercial bath towel designs, they originated from an interest in how a brush technique developed in earlier work could mimic the tactile quality of woven fabric. One monochrome composition recalls the optical structures of Victor Vasarely, while the striped painting evokes Bridget Riley. Here the relationship between source and reference becomes circular: commercial design, itself shaped by the legacy of modernist abstraction, returns once again to the realm of painting. Across all four works, source material functions less as a subject than as a point of departure. The paintings explore the balance between what is controlled and what is allowed to emerge; between fidelity and invention; between systems inherited from the world and the unpredictable possibilities of paint. Throughout, references to twentieth-century abstraction persist, sometimes consciously pursued and sometimes discovered along the way, as each work follows its own journey away from its origins.

Meridian Pharmacy, 2013-2016. Oil and copper leaf on canvas, 110 x 215 cm

After Mondrian, 2019. Oil on diamond format canvas panel, 27 x 27 cm.

Towel painting 2, 2026. Oil on canvas, 60 x 45 cm.

Towel Painting 1, 2026. Oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm.