Alexis Soul-Gray’s carnival of chaos

Picture this: in the shrouded silence of an abandoned theatre, a faint, flickering glow persists – an elusive light casting an unearthly halo across the empty stage. Its pale, trembling illumination dances against the darkness, whispering secrets of performances long gone. This is the kind of thing that people in the theatre call “ghost light”. Spooky, huh? Alexis Soul-Gray’s paintings, which are currently on display under that title at William Hine in Camberwell, are anything but dimly lit or melancholy. These are stridently bold pictures, careering across the canvas in revelrous parades and eccentric carnivals overlaid with sweeping washes of colour. Without a doubt, they are pictures of intense and atmospheric drama. But what is the performance about?

For the writer Lizzie Lloyd, the exhibition’s largest work, Ghost Light, the final scene (2025), is “a stage-like bacchanal of amateur dramatics” where an “anachronistic motley of performers – jesters, dancers, fairies, mime artists, dolls, pixies – [are] dressed up, made up, acting out, acting up.” Add to this scene a snarling white wolf in an orange dress; what looks to be Saint Sebastian with a deer’s antlers for hands; and a moon, hiding in the treetops, who winks on the fantastical melee. A podgy harlequin, the tricksy and mischievous character of the Commedia dell’Arte, who has deceived and danced in a multi-coloured diamond-patterned outfit for centuries, appears to make a bubble with a blue tiger’s face in it. It’s all weirdly wonderful. “Each time I start a new piece, I genuinely want to change, to become a version of myself I haven’t yet been”, Soul-Gray tells me. “But I always end up slipping back into a more chaotic, instinctive way of working.”

I asked Soul-Gray where some of the references in ‘Ghost Light’ came from. “There are no direct references to other artists but I did start looking at Picasso’s Rose Period paintings when I started this work and now I can see a resemblance between my harlequin and the figure in Picasso’s Acrobat and Young Harlequin but I was actually inspired here by a Victorian trading card.” Her work has a touch of Paula Rego’s magical realism and a smidge of Max Ernst’s surrealist animals, but her style is unique in part because of the way the figures and symbols seem to coalesce and fade into one another. If it wasn’t for the faint outline of a child archer, a painting like The Horse Woman (2025) would look pretty abstract. “There’s this ongoing push to move forward, to evolve but it’s always met with the realisation that I can’t be anything other than myself. And so I fall back into a visual language that I’m constantly torn about – partly ashamed of, and partly in awe of.”

And so, the more one looks at Soul-Gray’s paintings, the more one sees. It’s as though you see through the permeable surface of the paintings into another world and to yet another work. Whether it’s to Picasso or to James Ensor or to Mamma Andersson, you can recognise Soul-Gray’s subtle gestures to art history, but her ambition is clearly not to revise or reimagine those histories to make a contemporary statement about them (as in, say, the work of Kerry James Marshall or Jesse Mockrin) but to take us someplace else entirely. “When an image is stripped of its original context, its facts, its lineage… it becomes threadbare and porous in a way that gives me the ability to form new orders and non-sequential narratives”, Soul-Gray says. “I also find this to be true of the digitised image, such as the screenshot for example… it is like an echo of itself, devoid of clear meaning and apt for re-invention. The disorder I can create by re-arranging other people’s lives and experiences mirrors how I experience memory.” While the worlds of the circus and the carnival can feel a little antiquated, everything in the exhibition is geared back to how we consume images today. In our increasingly atomised screen-lives, we never spend much time with a single image. Even when we do, images are so often a version of something else – a meme, or AI-generated, or clipped and taken out of context, or screenshotted, as Soul-Gray says – and we remain scrambling less for meaning as for provenance.

“I feel very close to my work and at the same time entirely separate from it”, Soul-Gray reflects, as an outsider herself to her creations, as though she does not feel entirely in charge of the decisions she makes. The works often feature outsiders who are themselves lost in a kind of spectral and even anonymous countenance, identifiable only by the action they are doing (the archer, the fencer, the dancer, the boxer). “I have this phrase that repeats in my head and comes from school French lessons: Je joue au tennis! [I play tennis!]”, Soul-Gray reflects, and it makes her think about “how we define ourselves, how we seek out approval” by explaining what we do, and how we identify in the act of doing. We all know what an archer does (they shoot arrows) or a boxer (they punch people in the face for sport), but can you tell me what an “epilogist” does, the titular subject of one of Soul-Gray’s paintings? No, probably not. Me neither. I looked it up. An epilogist is the writer or speaker of an epilogue, a section or speech at the end of a book or play that serves as a comment on or a conclusion to what has happened. Clearly, they are someone who always knew how the play would end, but whose job it is to bring everything together tidily. To tie a nice, neat bow around what we have seen. Soul-Gray’s pictures do anything but.

Part of the challenge of Soul-Gray’s works is that they play on the edges of fairytales and fantasy but not in any of the ways that we remember from childhood. There are no hidden stories that explain how we can be better children (or adults) in her pictures. “When I was a child, I was told that fairytales were silly and girls growing up should know better than to play too much with dolls or engage in fantasy storytelling”, the artist reflects: “The real world, of course, was what mattered: how thin you were, how many boys fancied you, and what teachers said about you at parents’ evening. This internalised experience created some kind of shame around ideas of fantasy and storytelling, a sort of pointless rejection of history and folk culture because it didn’t fit into this pseudo feminist Thatcherite capitalist thin dream that I was being fed daily.”

William Hine’s exciting programme is part of a renaissance of new art galleries in Camberwell. Around the corner is Sim Smith, who opens the first UK display of Sarah Miska’s work for Frieze Week. Not merely a hyper-realist painter of pretty horses with winning garlands, Miska’s new series confronts the all-too-British tradition of hunting to explore ritualistic displays of power in our divided country. Further south, Graces Mews opened in June with a photography-led programme and an exhibition of Dick Jewell. During Frieze, they’re showing works by Barry Kamen, widely known as a model of the Buffalo movement in the 1980s but also, it turns out, a compelling artist straddling various movements from Dada to Abstract Expressionism. Camberwell is now one of the most dynamic neighbourhoods for new art spaces in the city, bucking the trend of Mayfair closures. Even further out, at the Peckham Pelican, you’ll find Billy Moon’s periodic lecture series which has, in just a few short months, become the art world’s equivalent to the blossoming era of “reading culture” on the literary scene. Young Moon has hosted some of the biggest names in contemporary art, from Katy Hessel to Pam Evelyn, Rachel Jones to Martin Parr. On 23rd October, Soul-Gray will be lecturing on her work and practice. Mark your calendars. I’ve no doubt she will put on a show.