Luke Wagner’s haunting utopian vision of the landscape appears back-lit, relying on the artist’s technique of using many delicate veils of oil paint. Darkly painted swathes of pared-down terrain are rich with classical echoes yet the surrealist elements override to unnerve and provoke the viewer to look again. The promise of solitude beckons us to enter these seductively "stripped bare" environments and to search for the spiritual beyond the visual. GLOVER PRIZE FINALIST 2007 "For all my life I have been working at deciphering and understanding the landscape around me …Tasmania. Tasmanian terrain is ancient and reminiscent of Gondwana. There is a rugged foreboding primal quality, yet for the past two hundred years or so there has been a European presence. This new culture is still trying to make sense of and understand this landscape. Such a necessary understanding in order to be able to live in a place and feel connected and comfortable. I am sensitive to the implications and possibilities of human presence in my surroundings. I use suggestions of this presence to imbue poignancy and a sense of uncertainty in my images. "My paintings are composed in my studio from experience and memory . They are filtered recollections of places , but not actually any particular place. They are amalgamations of several places, but often reminiscent of one. These pictures have flowed, with one leading to another as I have built the exhibition." Luke Wagner 2007 Hailing from a family whose heritage boasts 150 years in Tasmania, the artist says he feels "comfortable and connected being an inhabitant", and though his paintings go off at a tangent to the predictable Australian landscape painting genre, they still manage to reflect their roots. Living halfway up Mt Wellington behind Hobart on a picturesque site with a five hectare lake, Wagner paints from his studio, and attends to the business of frame-making four days per week.