TEN is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by James Rielly, one of the notable YBA’s of the 90s and his work is part of collections such as Tate, Saatchi and the National Museum of Wales. Rielly grew up in Holyhead and now lives in France and exhibits internationally

Tŷ Mawr includes a series of oil paintings on canvas and linen, heavily gessoed and delicately painted. Akin to religious frescos, we see familiar and reoccurring motifs – some of these present throughout Rielly’s career – his own-made iconography offering modern-day parables

These paintings appear as a snapshot of an ongoing narrative, a ‘still’ of a fantastically mysterious and inherently dark folk tale. They tread the edge of the bizarre and the familiar with no obvious context, simultaneously threatening and cutesy, swaying between tragedy and comedy, and landing squarely in the wholly relevant. We approach the work with our own cultural points of reference, looking for context and ‘hooks’ to understand

Humour is the prevalent note, and Rielly uses that gallows humour as a common tool to bring us in. The overarching theme here is that of us humans, our human condition and the world we have destroyed for ourselves. Through pointing at the ridiculousness of it all and mock-laughing at the absurdity of modern life, Rielly’s sugar-coated satire gives us that buffer we need to look at ourselves without loosing hope – and to hopefully learn our lesson. He offers us a coping mechanism – if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry