RYAN LEE is pleased to announce El Universal, the gallery’s fourth solo show of paintings by British artist Tim Braden. Inspired by travel – an idea of it, a critique of it, others’ and his own – Braden’s scenes evoke his characteristic style, wavering between the dreamily figurative and the purely abstract.

Two iconic artists’ sojourns in Mexico served as particular inspiration for this series: the first was Robert Smithson’s experience at Palenque, the site of ancient Mayan ruins in Chiapas, during which he was ironically more fascinated with its urban surrounds. The second was Josef and Anni Albers’ visits, particularly throughout the 1950s, to various pre-Columbian sites of artistic, architectural, and archaeological import, and their teaching and artwork that resulted.

“What do we expect when we go off in search of inspiration or discovery?” asks Braden. “Surprise? Disappointment?” His paintings transport us through several vantage points rendered abstract once the memories reached the canvas at his London studio. In Blue Mountain Bus (Tehuacan), “incidental views of figures half-seen from a passing bus are rebuilt into landscape studies;” and El Universal is a slice-of-life perspective on a woman reading at a bistro table, its gently placed details conjuring a quotidian nostalgia.

Despite the untainted poeticism of these travel paintings, Braden is in fact inspired by what he deems “the failures” of expedition. For example, Smithson’s wayward interest, in 1969, in Palenque’s neighboring civic spaces, which he found to be in their own curious senses of ruin; or, four decades prior, Henri Matisse’s unexpected creative preference for the vitality of America over the so-called “lethargy” of his original destination, Tahiti.

The multiplicities of enthusiasm experienced by traveling artists and tourists alike may range from critical to celebratory. It is from both ends of this spectrum of response that Braden pulls inspiration, enjoying the irony that, though wholly related to the country, “Most of the work was made before I had even been to Mexico,” he says. “The trip itself became an exercise in matching expectations.”

The Albers, whose influential trips Braden in part credits to his own expectations, documented immense deference to the styles, culture and experiences of Mexico. Spurred on by a fascination for their intimacy with the country and its impact on them, Braden dedicated part of the pandemic lockdown to researching and painting it. Rendered in a vast set of colors, Anni in Mexico 2 is directly based on a black-and-white photograph that Josef had taken of her at the steps of the Oaxacan archaeological site Monte Albán. Other works, Braden says, are “large abstract paintings infected by the colours and shapes from archaeology and textile books,” illustrating Mexico’s allure through rich renditions of its landscapes, artistic inheritances, history, and people.

The Albers, from the 1930s through the 60s, carried their Mexico field visits into their artwork and into the classroom at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where they both taught. Invested in their presence and impact there, Braden’s Lake Eden depicts the campus’s dining building, while other works in this series are based on photographs of its students.

From the Carolinas to Chichén Itzá, Braden’s paintings reinterpret not only sites and spaces, but also the looking-at those sites and spaces. They carry us through firsthand and secondhand time and place, creating a layer of experiences that resist their pin-pointed provenance in favor of open-ended, universally resonant portrayals.