Reverie: Hypnotic new exhibition explores Welsh landscapes

A mesmerising new exhibition of artwork in north Wales is blurring the line between landscape and imagination.

Llandudno’s Ffin y Parc gallery will host Jonathan Retallick’s solo exhibition, Reverie, a major installation at the gallery covering two floors.

Born and working from a studio on Ynys Môn, it’s no surprise that Jonathan’s work focuses on landscape and the emotional effect it can have on viewers.

With nature as his main inspiration, the artist studied at the Aberystwyth School of Art, sketching storms over the sea, before returning to Ynys Môn.

Jonathan’s oil paintings blur the lines of realism, capturing bright light and its interplay with shadow, while consistently drawing from the natural world.

He explained: “I am interested in creating an image that appears to have created itself. An organic composition suggesting another plausible existence that lives just as much in the imagination as it does our own terrestrial realm.”

Jonathan was selected as a Young Welsh Artist in the YWA Exhibition in 2021, and his work has made it into the collections of the Royal Academy and the National Library of Wales.

Represented by Ffin y Parc since 2023, Reverie is the latest of several regular exhibitions at the gallery, and will feature both the largest and some of the smallest artwork ever shown there.

Roland Powell, Ffin y Parc Gallery owner, said: “The work is a potent blend of hyperrealism and abstraction. With vivid saturated colours, flowing lines, deep shadows, unidentifiable sources of light and the deliberate absence of context or sense of scale, he creates visions that are ambiguous.

“Images might have their genesis in the vastness of empty skies or in moments of enclosure and intimacy. Subatomic, intracellular or cosmic, they become transmissions from putative alien worlds or secret inner worlds. Open to simultaneous, contradictory currents of interpretation.”

Though smooth, Reverie’s works invite questions as to their subject matter, from microscopic details that hint at human bodies to the dangerous shadows of what could be undersea caves.

Though engaging and marked by a powerful stillness, the paintings and their creator seem unwilling to give any clues, creating a sense of unease even in the warmest of pieces.

Roland Powell continued: “The technique here is rigorous and time-consuming. What seems almost instantaneous is the result of a great deal of patience, of blending and layering and polishing. The results are a meditation on stasis and chaos, pleasure and anxiety, presence and absence.”

Reverie will run at Ffin y Parc Gallery, Trinity Square, Llandudno, from 20 March to 11 April 2026. The works are available to view and purchase via the gallery’s website.