BETWEEN THE FIELDS

Tomoya Matsuzaki and Freddy Tuppen

Between the Fields

April – June 2026

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane

Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon, Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,

And the deep lane insists on the direction Into the village, in the electric heat

Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light Is absorbed, not reflected, by grey stone.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence. Wait for the early owl.

From East Coker by T. S. Eliot, 1940

Between the Fields explores the British landscape as a place shaped as much by memory and perception as by physical form, where land is not only seen, but felt. Carrying traces of time, absence, and a quiet, uncanny presence.

This sensibility runs through much of British landscape painting of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Artists such as Thomas Gainsborough helped establish the genre, while J. M. W. Turner used light and atmosphere to dramatic effect. John Constable, by contrast, grounded his work in close observation of rural England.

Between the Fields is especially informed by Paul Nash, whose vision of the countryside as both real and dreamlike draws on the idea of genius loci, or spirit of place. His landscapes, marked by ruins, megaliths, and drifting mist, suggest a terrain layered with history and unseen forces, where the familiar becomes subtly strange and just out of reach.

Extending this lineage, the exhibition considers the monolith as a primal marker of space – an architectural form reduced to pure presence, poised between relic and proposition. In this context, Freddy Tuppen’s luminous lights emerge as contemporary monoliths: atmospheric objects that seem to glow from within.

Through coloured veils and layered diffusion, they inhabit a threshold between visibility and obscurity, inviting reflection on time, perception, and the unseen.

Alongside this, Tomoya Matsuzaki’s paintings and drawings operate as both material objects and spatial constructs. Working on irregular hand-formed plaster slabs or torn pieces of paper, he layers conscious and subconscious gestures to produce unstable, shifting rhythms in which opposing forces coexist. Shaped by his experience of living in the UK, his work draws on the subdued tonalities of British painting, where landscape is understood less as a fixed view than as a sensation – muted, overcast, and quietly psychological. As Matsuzaki himself reflects:

The world, illuminated by the light that reaches through the thin filter of clouds, is pale and faint…

Landscapes are a manifestation of one’s emotion. The landscape you are looking at is the place where you

now find yourself…Tomoya Matsuzaki

Tomoya Matsuzaki (b. 1977, Fukuoka, Japan) moved to the UK in 1997. He earned a BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2002, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. He lives and works in London.

Selected exhibitions include: Sediment, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2025), Layers of Accumulated Time: Depicting the world we live in, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2025), Artist Rooms 2025, Encounter, Lisbon (2025), Unbound Material, Sid Motion Gallery, London (2023), Petrichor Grey, Volt, Eastbourne (2023), Unmapped Territory, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2021), Crossing, Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo (2019), John Moores Painting Prize 2018, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2018), Graphic Interchange Format, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-sea (2015), Endogenous II, Maria Stenfors, London (2013), Arrivals, Pump House Gallery, London (2004).

Freddy Tuppen is a London-based artist and designer who embraces the plural and the process-driven. His outputs include architecture and furniture, as well as lighting and other objects. Whether a home, a garden studio, a lamp or a pepper mill, every endeavour is informed by decades spent learning, teaching, experimenting and refining. The idea of constraints as possibilities echoes throughout his practice. Imposing limitations while making room for spontaneity, he’s guided by the honesty of humble materials and uncomplicated forms that are rich in detail and spirit. Working at all scales, he crafts spaces, furniture and objects that express not only a clear function, but the physical experience of making.

Between the Fields is curated by Naja Rantorp