Cards

Scattered across this hillside are what look like playing cards, face up, their red pips and black spades catching the light. That small joke gives the painting its title and also its logic: once you notice one card, the whole landscape starts to read differently, and those pale rectangles tumbling down the slope could be cards, or houses, or laundry laid out to dry. The rust-red earth in the upper left, the olive terraces stepping down the middle, and the striped blue and white awnings clustered at the bottom right suggest a hot country seen from above, maybe a market town wedged into a valley.

Ella Williams works in a loose, contemporary painterly style, building the scene from flat patches of colour rather than careful outlines. The paint is thin in places, letting earlier layers show through, and shapes are left unresolved on purpose. The blue shipping container near the centre is one of the few things drawn with hard edges, which makes it sit oddly among all the soft-edged fields around it. Whether the artist began with a real view and let the cards creep in, or invented the whole thing from the start, is anyone's guess. The pleasure here is in the puzzle of scale: a hand of cards and a hillside village given the same treatment, so that neither quite wins.