The show, entitled ‘Remnants,’ brings together a series of works that depict an imaginary post-apocalyptic world that the artist sites ‘far into the future.’ This marks a new formal and conceptual direction in the artist’s career.

Tejada has moved away from the abstract works that typified his practice while at the Royal College and the years immediately following. For this new series he has instead adopted a landscape format that allows him to present a surrealistic future world. He places objects in this landscape that for him conjure up our present society but here are strewn about the place like fragments from a ship wreck washed up on a shore. These are littered fragments of our destroyed society. In ‘Palace’ (illustrated), a transient shelter stands in the middle of a wasteland, only barely protecting the precious objects that lie beneath it. The random assortment of objects that appear in these works are both disturbing and funny, and invite both playfulness as well as more unsettling psychological reading.

While Tajada’s practice represents the continuation of a tradition of painting typically associated with western art, his unusual and idiosyncratic choice of subject matter and the apparently introverted, quasi- confessional tone in these works place it firmly at the forefront of contemporary practice.

Seeing the work from the perspective of international culture and politics, Guillermo Pardave, Cultural Attaché at the Peruvian Embassy, comments, ‘Tejada’s new work engages with both European and South American cultures, commenting on issues of abundance and shortage, the powerful and the powerless and the relation between past and future worlds.’

The exhibition opens with a private view on 18 November from 7pm. The gallery is located at 52 Sloane Street, London SW1X 9SP.