Renaissance Undone
A Solo Exhibition by Ian Rayer-Smith
Painting has always been a conversation with time. Across centuries, artists have wrestled with the same essential questions: How does the representation of the body, landscape, light, gesture and humanity convey something larger than itself? In Renaissance Undone, Ian Rayer-Smith engages this lineage, neither imitating nor rejecting it, but by opening it up — breaking its architecture, loosening its structures, and allowing its fragments to breathe within a contemporary, expressive form.
Rayer-Smith’s work stands at the threshold between reverence and defiance. On the one hand is The Renaissance — with its exalted harmony, its devotion to human form, its search for the divine order — serving here as both foundation and foil. In these large-scale canvases, we glimpse echoes of structure, glimmers of sacred geometry, and elements of chiaroscuro. But then, quickly, these elements dissolve into raw colour, ruptured gestures, and layered improvisation. What once seemed certain in art history is destabilised, reimagined, undone.
The result is not destruction, but transformation. By dismantling the order of the Renaissance, Rayer-Smith creates a language of freedom, one in which painting becomes a living event rather than a fixed image. His brushwork is not an illustration of the past but an act of resistance against stasis — urgent, physical, uncontainable. Each canvas is a site of risk, where control and surrender collide, and where the viewer is invited into the restless act of becoming.
This restlessness is essential. For Rayer-Smith, painting is not a means of depicting something external but of uncovering something internal, something deeply human. His canvases do not offer tidy resolutions; instead, they pulse with the tension between memory and invention, discipline and abandon. They remind us that the Renaissance ideal of perfection, while beautiful, is ultimately unattainable — and that art’s true power lies not in perfection but in vulnerability, in its ability to mirror the complexities of lived experience.
Renaissance Undone thus speaks to both history and the present moment. At a time when contemporary culture is saturated with fleeting images, Rayer-Smith insists on the endurance of painting as a form of serious, embodied thought. His works are not passive objects; they are arenas of conflict and vitality, places where ancient ideals confront the urgency of today.
This exhibition also marks an important evolution in the artist’s career. Rayer-Smith has long been recognised for his bold abstractions and emotive canvases, collected by private patrons and institutions worldwide. But here, his practice pushes further — toward a more ambitious dialogue with art history itself. By reworking the legacy of the Renaissance, he positions himself within a lineage of artists who have not only inherited history but reshaped it. In doing so, he declares his commitment to painting not as safe nostalgia, but as renewal.
For collectors, curators, and critics, Renaissance Undone presents a body of work that is both visually arresting and intellectually rigorous. These are paintings that command space, hold the eye, and linger in the mind. They are works that remind us of painting’s unique capacity to carryforward the weight of history while simultaneously breaking free from it.
Ultimately, this exhibition is not simply about the Renaissance, or its undoing. It is about the urgency of painting itself — its refusal to die, its ability to reinvent itself, and its power to articulate the inexpressible. In Ian Rayer-Smith’s hands, painting becomes an act of freedom, a declaration that the most vital art is always unfinished, always in flux, always undone.
IAN RAYER-SMITH: RENAISSANCE UNDONE
Among a painter's struggles, none is more vexing or ultimately more gratifying than giving substance to effect, providing, allowing, a sense of materiality to the condition of pure brilliance. Such a gift of apparition would seem lan Rayer-Smith's for the taking. But rather than let his skills lead him, Rayer-Smith directs his virtuosic brush into a realm of sight where sky and ground, sea and tree emerge together in a surge of becoming. Heir to the vaunted British landscape tradition, Royer Smith paints for, and about, universal sensations.
His work embraces and feeds humankind's hunger for both beauty and insight and insight into beauty. For all its strife, the world is a glorious place, and Rayer-Smith celebrates how it appears to us.
Peter Frank
American Art Critic