Each of Saye’s paintings is a different version of these fading idylls, a lament for the utopian ideals of either living through Modernist values - buildings as machines for living - or in hippie communes, living off the land - simply off-grid.

Saye works intuitively, continually editing and revising his paintings, where structures and architecture appear simultaneously familiar and strange, rendered uncanny by an unnatural light from a source you cannot see, glowing beneath layers of under-painting. Ethereal figures become lost in deep shadow and details are seemingly erased - literally sanded out from the paintings, becoming fragments of fictions and memories. Saye builds up his paintings slowly on a smooth, absorbent gesso ground adding layers of thin, transparent glazes and impasto painting, drawing your attention to the surface of the painting where he allows his densely rendered images to dissolve into intricate patterns and abstraction, his colour palette references the faded colours of aged photographs and postcards fragments of Arcadian memories

Through the process of painting new narratives are constructed where any straightforward interpretation is undermined, diminished by the actual fragmentation of the initial imagery. These atmospheric paintings are quiet. Contemplative reflections full of nostalgia for an optimism that didn’t quite materialise.