The paintings in the exhibition navigate between representation and abstraction, between showing a concrete physical phenomenon and accessing an interior landscape of the imagination. Originally inspired by the painter’s memory of rituals conducted at Mount Shasta in northern California, the paintings depict the shapes and textures of mountains that seem suspended in their surrounding landscapes: deep black mountains are intersected, disrupted and illuminated by flashes of colour or planes of white. Light and darkness are a part of the same, interconnected surface. Thick layers of oil paint, applied by the artists in a slow process of addition and revision, forge their own, almost metaphysical territory of light and space. Claude Gigon, an autodidactic painter who lives and works in the Jura region of Switzerland, was particularly interested in mountains as a site for the expression of mystery and a quest for transcendence – both in various spiritual practices as well as in traditions of romantic landscape painting. Gigon’s practice seeks a moment of confrontation with the unknown, exploring affective and spiritual states; a timeless space of vision in both senses of the word. His paintings are topographies of the mind.