David Thorpe’s early collages exhibit all the painstaking labour of his involved process. Inspired by Victorian shadow puppets and Japanese woodcuts, Kings of the Night is deceiving in its complexity made simple. Constructed entirely from cut and pasted sheets of paper, David Thorpe uses only 5 colours to create this romantic scene of lonely South London tower blocks. Planning his image in ascending layers he creates an improbable sense of space: the buildings laid over sky, orange windows over buildings; each element convincingly self-contained and distanced with illusionary depth. The tress and plants are flawlessly cut in their doily-like intricacy from one solid sheet of card; the final details of a sublime world astoundingly reproduced in 2-dimensional kid-craft.

David Thorpe takes a leaf out of the home-craft manual and cuts coloured paper to project an idealised landscape that alludes more to an opening film shot of a city at night than the landscape in the painting. Inspired by daytime TV films, best selling paperbacks, and Japanese woodcut prints, David Thorpe constructs the sublime with cut and paste: scenes of urban isolation oozing sex appeal; 70s social architecture promising budget exotica.

David Thorpe crafts the sublime from scissors and glue – intricate scenes of urban paradise made up of precision cut layers of paper, reminiscent of Japanese woodcuts, or Casper David Friedrich paintings.

David Thorpe is a young artist who lives and works in London. In Do What You Have To Do, Thorpe constructs a utopian setting of council blocks, giving a sense of awesome glamour to the banal, a leisurely chic to the two teenagers hanging out on the steps.

David Thorpe’s collages present a spiritual chic of urban romanticism: inner city buildings rendered desolate and magnificent, are contemplations of the individual vs. the universe. This ‘power-of-one’ conviction is replicated through David Thorpe’s intensive process: each element is painfully stencilled with a penknife, and assembled with mind-boggling accuracy. Through his process, David Thorpe exemplifies the ability to create beauty from sheer will; macrocosms snipped from craft paper, the bedazzling sight of council flats on a still night. In a car passing over the bridge, David Thorpe silhouettes a tiny group of partying teenagers: a tribute to dandyism and eternal youth.

David Thorpe’s collages have become more abstracted; moving away from depictions of isolated urban-scapes, his most recent work embodies the same sentiments of spirituality, design, and nature, but strips away the representational aspect. Rather than envision the sublime outer world, The Quiet Voice operates as a self-contained fetish. David Thorpe capitalises on the tautology of his materials. Set in an occult-ish triangle, Thorpe arranges a plane of wood veneer, masked by a mesh of real twigs. The small black square punctuates the field like a window, giving the sense that this is a building viewed in extreme close-up. By painting faint circles over the collaged ground, David Thorpe enforces his object as a formalist model, made intimate and devotional by the string of beads dangling from its edge.

“I'm playing with certain associations,” David Thorpe divulges, “slightly New Age, slightly Space Age, slightly threatening…I'm absolutely in love with people who build up their own systems of belief.” In Fragile Resistance, David Thorpe draws upon modernist principles of object-making as a means to reference a totalitarian concept of aesthetics. His abstract form is defined by its own materiality: moulded plaster emanates a barbaric bone-like delicacy, entwined by a skin of strips of leather. Fragile Resistance plays a double role, as both object of contemplation and totem of desire.

David Thorpe’s sculptures evolved from his elaborate collaged paintings. They are increasingly concerned with using the physicality of materials to represent themselves. David Thorpe develops his sculptures to further explore the corporeality of his idea. Exchanging representation for actualisation, his sculptural work exists as artefacts plausibly plucked from his paintings and created in real-life. I Am Golden is Thorpe’s first foray into 3-dimensions. David Thorpe’s objects often merge formalist sculpture with functionality as a reiteration of the interconnectedness of ideology and lifestyle. In I Am Golden, mosaic tiled spheres form the basis of a miniature temple-like structure; the piece also doubles as a plant stand. By combining elements of real potted flowers with constructed decorative motifs, David Thorpe unites nature and artifice in a single utopian gesture.