SAGE's art practice is founded in drawing. Through drawing, SAGE manifests ideas of the world-building enterprise named Hypertelia. This place, set upon the island of Utopic Locus, exists somewhere between the unseen realms of inner visions and dreamscapes, explores the edgelands that circumvent figuration and abstraction.

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SAGE’s imagery seeks to communicate an atmosphere of these uncharted lands, devoid of human presence, where uncanny beings inhabit eerie woodlands and derelict wastelands. 

SAGE’s three current projects are as follows:

Paradise Lost 

Sage seeks to traverse past the familiarity of the figurative, to explore the precipice of abstraction’s unknowns. The intersection of these edgelands can be seen in his Paradise Lost series.

He sets out to accomplish this by extracting hues and shapes from iconic paintings by Michelangelo, Pieter Bruegel The Elder, Tintoretto, Botticelli, et al. This deconstruction process finds the rhythm and atmosphere of how paradise was depicted in the 15th to 17th centuries.

Through digitally repainting the original works, subtle distortions are created in the composition. Once a digital image reaches the cusp between figuration and abstraction, painting with oils commences.

Through this process Sage believes it is possible to decipher the visual poetry of the original works. Warping religious content presents the viewer with a purer distillation of colour and gesture.

Utopic Locus & Hypertelia 

Sage’s other long term project, Utopic Locus, maps the idea of a fictional island utopia.  The large diagrams, books and scrolls made for this project serve as a critical exploration of Disneyland’s use of architecture and semiotics to manipulate people for profiteering. Hypertelia is a hellish pleasure park set within the island complex of Utopic Locus; it encapsulates the totality of American consumerism that was founded on myths and deception, influenced in part by Edward Bernays’ writings. Here on the island you’ll find the real-life horror of attractions and experiences designed to subjugate one’s will and capitalise on exquisite fears. 

The New Plastic

Influenced by the spooky edgelands he roamed as a youth, such as Dick Turpin’s murderous heaths, in West London, it is Sage’s belief that portraiture’s corporeal concerns can also be explored through landscape, to expose something of the human condition; how our perception of the symbolic and ethereal, especially in derelict and uncanny places such as burial grounds and woodlands, transmutes into our psyche. Gnarly crepuscular trees and shadowy contorted foliage take on vaguely human forms. Hence, he is compelled to paint gloomy scenes that combine the atmosphere of horror cinema with dark memories from childhood. 

As Noël Carroll asks in his Philosophy Of Horror "Why horror?"; exploring why we seek out the horrific, in what he labels "a paradox of the heart”. This enquiry, at the dark centre of SAGE’s art practice, is presented for the viewer to experience and imagine.