The Paddocks Gallery is pleased to present Reflections, a solo exhibition by Cyrus Mahboubian. The exhibition brings together a series of black-and-white Polaroids and photographic compositions created during the artist’s residency at The Paddocks in autumn 2025, alongside works made in the English countryside and beyond.
Living between London and Oxfordshire, everyday walks in nature have become central to Mahboubian’s artistic practice, an ongoing ritual that shapes moments of observation. Across the exhibition, subtle shifts in light and atmosphere guide the images, allowing wandering to become a method of contemplation and escapism. Landscapes from Greece and the United Kingdom, and further afield such as Denmark, appear in continuity, forming compositions in which various places merge into a shared visual language.
Working exclusively with a 1960s Polaroid camera and increasingly rare black-and-white expired film, the artist embraces the material qualities and unpredictability of analogue photography. Individual Polaroids taken during his walks are later cut and recomposed, forming photographic collages in which parts align into unified images. Due to the film’s expired chemicals, the images often develop unexpected marks and imperfections. Rather than concealing them, the artist sometimes highlights these traces with gold paint, recalling the Japanese practice of kintsugi, where repair becomes part of the work.
Operating on a double level, Reflections, the title of the exhibition, refers both to the contemplative state that accompanies the artist’s process and to the visual logic of the works themselves, where fragments of images are mirrored and recomposed into new photographic compositions.
During his time exploring Volos and Mount Pelion, Mahboubian developed a routine of walking on Goritsa, a small natural hill overlooking the sea and the city. These wanderings form the foundation of the work, attentive to the rhythms of nature–the subtle hues of wild plants, the contours of rocks and boulders, the curves of trees. Similar encounters with the landscape are registered in works created in the Cotswolds, Cornwall, and Scotland, where horses appear through open fields and tree roots emerge as structural elements within the compositions.
Suspended between place and presence, the works hold a sense of stillness and timelessness. In contrast to the accelerated circulation of images today, Mahboubian’s practice unfolds through a slower process of walking, observing, and assembling, where separate moments and locations converge and landscape becomes both subject and method for reflection.