“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”  George Bernard Shaw

The imagination is a hermetic inner-world in which we play out our relationship to the outer world. In turn, the world becomes a vast playground for our imaginations. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Peter Rodulfo and Gabriel Bodnariu, two of London Art’s most popular painters.

Rodulfo’s practice is located in that murky border between reality and dream state. Human figures and sometimes mythical creatures, explore bizarre landscapes reminiscent of Shelley’s Xanadu in Kubla Khan. Hallucinogenic colours and magical imagery transport us to a place of internal adventure outside of time and logic. Rodulfo is prolific, his inspiration boundless, the only place he won’t travel to is normality.

Perhaps his inspiration stems from a childhood spent travelling to exotic places like India and Australia, while his father was working as a British Intelligence Agent. “I am more interested in the inaccuracies of memories than their precision”, he reveals. “If a landscape interests me as a subject to paint, it’s because it seems to touch upon an already existent inner landscape.”

The work of Romanian artist Gabriel Bodnariu is allegorical, and heavily influenced by the surrealists, but firmly rooted in social reality. Here, a satirical reference to human vanity, there, a mocking critique of social structures: consumerism, politics, The Church. The artist calls his works ‘kitsches’, as he believes, “the kitsch is omnipresent in today’s society.”

Imogen O'Rorke