Angelica Hopton Echenique (b. 2000)

Looking West off Baratti

Acrylic on canvas

Size: 40cm x 50cm (canvas); 43cm x 53cm (frame)

Signed

​

Angelica Hopton’s Looking West off Baratti is a beautifully elusive work of art: the sea is at once present and undefined; the horizon-line both distinct and imperceptible; the sky receding out from and into the ocean below. A sense of spatial depth is only faintly hinted as blushes of pink and light-blue fuse into the greyish tones of the painting, blurring perspectival distances. Instead, sky and sea are subtly differentiated through faint and delicate gradations of colour and texture, from the crusts of dry acrylic paint at the bottom to the light wash of pink at the top. Angelica’s seascape has a distinctly ‘modern’ feel. The heavy acrylics add a gritty texture to a natural world that is at once more aestheticized and abstract but also more direct and physical. The sublime is here that of an awesome indistinction, foreboding in dark, stark modulations of tone and hue.

​

Angelica’s striking seascape will be hanging alongside the eighteenth-century, Venetian Landscape (School of Giuseppe Zais, 1709-1781) and the nineteenth-century Marine off the coast of La Manche (Theodore Weber, 1838-1907). Exhibited together, these three paintings encompass more than two centuries of aesthetic representations of nature. Angelica’s dark, steely sea captures some of the dramatic sublimity of Weber’s tossing waves, whilst her sky of hazy pinks and glowing yellows creates an idyllic, romantic tone that plays off the fantasy of the eighteenth-century, Venetian pastoral. 

Angelica is a very talented artist; although she is mostly commissioned for her portraiture, we are extremely excited for the opportunity to exhibit one of her seascapes in the gallery!