Here, Time Pauses: Stephen Price

Galerie REVEL is proud to present Here, Time Pauses, a solo exhibition of Ghanaian-Italian painter Stephen Price. Across this new body of work, Price deepens his engagement with color and composition, presenting landscapes and figures that inhabit pictorially dense, contemplative realms. In this sanctuary, we find Price’s figures in wooded clearings and scenic environments, all extending the visual world Price continues to explore, where his characters discreetly find their place. 

To encounter a Price painting is to meet his now-signature solemn figures, at once statuesque and alive, like sculptural forms pausing to take a deep inhale. Their presence is serene, sometimes wistful, and always at ease. Price’s figures always seem to turn inward, outward, or toward something, or someone, beyond the viewer’s reach. They are absorbed in thought as much as they are absorbed by the environments that frame them. Across this new series, Price expands the scale and scope of his pictorial frame.

In one expansive yellow landscape, two boys appear in a pool of water, small against the rolling mountains in a luminous field of dreams. In another, two women sit side by side in a wooded clearing, their solidarity and placement resonating with classical portraiture, and contrasting with the solitude of his usual subjects. And for the first time, in The Moon Was But A Chin Of Gold (2025), Price’s figures vanish entirely, allowing the full expanse of landscape to breathe and the natural world to take center stage. 

Price’s process is central to the emotional tenor of his works. He begins with acrylic to establish structure in broad strokes, then layers charcoal, oil, and pastel, which blur and accumulate into his distinctive forms. Crucially, Price ensures that the underlayers remain visible, with earlier marks pressing forward alongside fresh strokes, lending his figures their characteristic textured, almost marble-like quality. By contrast, trees, foliage, and branches are rendered with deliberate thickness, their dense lines offsetting the tenderness of the human form. Vegetation functions at times as a wallpaper-like backdrop, and at other moments occupies the foreground, forming an ornate frame that defines the space around his figures.

Price’s progressive exploration of color has unfolded over recent years. While deep blues and purples remain central to much of his palette, individual canvases now open onto distinct chromatic worlds. Autumnal yellows and oranges, tender greens, each reflect the rhythms of the seasons within his landscapes. In several works, a bright moon punctuates the scene, the sole marker of time in otherwise timeless spaces. In this new body of work, time pauses, and yet, perhaps for the first time, Price is actively tracing the passage of time. That is to say: in order for time to pause, it also must pass. 

Price’s chromatic range, along with the worlds he constructs, reflects a deep engagement with the histories of landscape and color. His treatment of gardens and natural environments certainly evokes the styles explored in late 19th- and early 20th-century landscape painting. Meanwhile his vibrant, saturated tones echo the luminous palettes of African modernists such as Yusuf Grillo. Together, all these references create a composition that is rigorously orchestrated and familiar, reinforcing the contemplative, immersive quality that is increasingly becoming a defining element of his work.

In Here, Time Pauses, Price’s figures and landscapes interlock in Edenic harmony. There is a call to a specific place, a Here, which situates the point of view of the painting, a place from which the story is being told. Many figures are alone, although they do not seem lonely, and the pairings that appear carry an understated intimacy. At the same time, Price’s evolving landscapes assume an increasingly vital presence. His figures, once bound to introspection, now exist in dialogue with the changing world around them. To this effect, the canvases carry an undeniably romantic undertone, a certain longing that courses through both figure and environment with almost religious intensity. Atmospheric and emotive, attuned to the sanctuary’s serenity, Price’s works reveal a world where time truly seems to stand still.

Text by Max Diallo Jakobsen.