William Roper-Curzon: Reflections of Mani — Opening Reflection @ CULT Aimee Friberg

Art Bae Event Link September 10, 5:30 pm Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 6–8 pm CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to present Reflections of Mani , a solo exhibition of new paintings by British-born, Athens-based artist William Roper-Curzon. Rooted in the landscape of Greece’s Mani Peninsula, the exhibition brings together paintings made directly in the landscape alongside larger works developed from memory in the artist’s studio in Athens. The exhibition runs from September 10 to October 24 at CULT Aimee Friberg, 1401 16th Street. The artist will be present on September 10 from 6–8 pm for a reception, with a walk-through preceding the opening at 5:30 pm. At the southern edge of the Peloponnese, Mani is one of Greece’s wildest and most elemental landscapes—a terrain of exposed limestone, rocky outcrops, pebbled beaches and steep hills descending into crystalline turquoise waters. Olive trees, prickly pears and silvery-green scrub emerge from the dry earth, while the colors of the hills shift between purple, brown, yellow and green beneath the bright, intense light of an unobstructed sun. Roper-Curzon has returned repeatedly to Mani, drawn to both its physical rawness and the sense of an older world that remains palpable there. Pausanias, the geographer famous for his travel writing and descriptions of Greece in the Roman era, wrote of its sacred places and traditions, while centuries later Constantine VII recorded the persistence of ancestral beliefs and practices among its people. For Roper-Curzon, this history is not separate from the landscape but embedded within it. Mani is truly a living palimpsest, its terrain bearing and accumulating traces of geological time, ancient mythology, ritual, conflict, generations of cultivation and human habitation—all occupying the same ground and continuing to make themselves felt in the present. The majority of the paintings in Reflections of Mani were made en plein air, painted directly in oil on board while Roper-Curzon was spending extended periods on the peninsula. Making these works is an intensely physical practice, requiring stamina and endurance. Roper-Curzon hikes into the rugged terrain carrying his materials, immersing himself in conditions that are as demanding as they are beautiful—exposed rock, relentless light and heat, prickly vegetation, the glinting aquamarine waters and vast horizons. Jewel-toned poppies and other wildflowers, evergreen shrubs, spiny plants and aromatic herbs punctuate the otherwise arid landscape. The body becomes an instrument of perception: feet register the uneven ground, skin absorbs the heat and wind, eyes adjust to the glare, and breath changes with exertion. Bombarded by light, heat and color, painting becomes less an act of observation than one of surrender—a process of stripping away the unnecessary, working instinctively, and responding to what is happening in a particular place and moment. This physical immersion also connects the artist to the layered history of the peninsula. Mani’s ancient and ancestral past is not presented as a distant subject to be illustrated, but as something encountered somatically through movement, duration and attention. Walking through the landscape, pausing to paint, and returning repeatedly to the same terrain create a form of embodied historical awareness. The past seems to persist not only in archaeological remains or written accounts, but in the rhythms of the land itself—in the routes between villages, the persistence of local customs, and the sensation of inhabiting a place shaped by generations of human and nonhuman life. The exhibition’s larger oil-on-canvas paintings extend this process in a different direction. Made after Roper-Curzon returned to his Athens studio, they draw upon memory rather than direct observation. Forms become more abstracted and color untethered from naturalistic description, giving the works an ethereal and almost psychedelic quality. Memory becomes a kind of threshold thro…