Luke Edward Hall’s solo exhibition at Patricia Low Contemporary, Venice, is set in ‘The Silver Vale’, a place where mythology and personal identity merge, where landscape and fantasy dissolve into one another. The exhibition presents new paintings created by Hall in his Oxfordshire studio over the past few months. The starting point for this new body of work is the large painting XXX made in September 2024—a vision of Pan, the Greek god of the wild, leading a figure into a glowing, dreamlike woodland. This moment of initiation, at once intimate and ecstatic, became the catalyst for a series of paintings and drawings that examine queer identity through the lens of mythology and nature.
Hall’s paintings echo the themes of E.M. Forster’s 1912 short story The Story of a Panic, in which the god Pan appears to a young outcast named Eustace, transforming him irrevocably. Forster’s tale has been interpreted as an allegory for queer revelation, a reading that resonates deeply with Hall. Pan, in his works, is both a seducer and a liberator, leading figures away from the constraints of the ordinary world and into a heightened, transcendent existence. But perhaps Pan is not external at all—perhaps he represents something internal, something required to embrace the self fully and without hesitation. In the artist’s words, Pan “represents the courage needed to live a life separate, apart, wonderful.”
The landscapes Hall conjures—fields awash in gold, rivers of lilac, skies charged with impossible pinks—draw from real locations, particularly Devon and Cornwall, but are rendered through his own imagined, mythic lens. The Silver Vale, an invented setting within his works, is a site of queer refuge, where identity is unfixed, fluid, and free. This re-enchantment of landscape is central to Hall’s visual language, recalling a lineage of artists who have depicted the male figure through a poetic, queer gaze. His work exists in dialogue with Duncan Grant’s pastoral sensuality, the charged androgyny of Jean Cocteau’s drawings, and Andy Warhol’s dreamlike depictions of the male form. Like these artists before him, Hall conveys a world that is full of magical potential, a space where queer desire and mythology entwine.
There is a tactility to these paintings that underscores their connection to lived experience. Pan is not a distant, abstract symbol but something tangible, something pursued in the everyday. Hall himself speaks to this sense of presence: “I live and work in the country, and when I walk in the fields and the woods I genuinely find myself in pursuit of Pan: he can be found sometimes, leading me, I am sure of it.”
The Silver Vale is not only a landscape but a state of being—an offering to those who, like Hall’s protagonists, seek something beyond the mundane. In these works, the mythic and the real collapse into one another, and we are invited to step through the frame, to follow Pan into the swirling unknown, and to embrace the magic of freedom.
Text by Gemma Rolls-Bentley
