Pusher Gallery is pleased to announce its debut exhibition, ‘Rain Barrel’, an exhibition at Fitzrovia Gallery, London of new works by Elliot Roberts (b. 2002, Devon), a recent graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford.

For the paintings in this exhibition, Roberts takes as his starting point the brewery in rural Devon where he has worked for the last six years. The lived experience of this setting and its activities drives a desire to explore the relationship between landscape and memory in a manner that steps around the direct depiction of a location and the characters that inhabit it. Instead, a haptic, half-remembered image of this workplace emerges, for which Roberts’ engagement with painting as a medium is both cause and consequence. Painting acts as an equivalence for memory: aiming towards social documentary but filtered through his own subjectivities of doubt, frustration and longing, until we are lost in a hazy surface of chipped paint and furniture varnish.

In its capacity to demonstrate how notions of depiction can benefit from the elusive nature of the painterly surface, ‘Hold Music’, 2023 becomes a touchstone work for this exhibition. A central, crouching figure directs us to identify other figurative elements – a low, curved wall; a truncated pair of legs – whilst being left to second- guess the ambiguous green form in the lower left corner and the floating pips of yellow.