Dust and Devotion

James Lang’s Contemporary Icons from a Fragmented Faith

James Lang is a British artist currently living and working in South London, having returned from Beijing in June 2022 after nearly five years in China. He graduated from Liverpool School of Art in 2011 and completed an MA in Visual Arts at Camberwell College of Arts in 2014.

Lang describes his time in China as a transformative experience. Paradoxically, the cultural and geographical distance deepened his connection to the Western heritage he had once left behind. This renewed perspective led to a fascination with early medieval Christian art - a period he sees not only as a spiritual cornerstone of Western culture but also as aesthetically resonant with contemporary sensibilities. The flatness, faded colours, and devotional intent of these works stand in contrast to the illusionism of the Renaissance, offering, in Lang’s view, a more poignant and enigmatic visual language.

Lang’s practice is grounded in sustained observation. He frequently visits churches and cathedrals across Europe that still house rare fragments of medieval wall paintings. These images - half-erased, fragile, yet insistently present - form a silent dialogue with time. Lang is drawn to their modesty and sincerity, admiring the devotional quality embedded in the labour of anonymous artisans whose names have not survived, but whose marks remain. His paintings seek to recreate and extend that lineage, exploring what sacred image-making might mean in a secular, hyper-digital present.

Working primarily in painting and mixed media, Lang constructs works that appear like relics from a past civilization while being unmistakably contemporary in their materiality and logic. The surfaces of his paintings often carry sculptural weight - built up through layers of acrylic, pigments, and wood dust - and are underpinned by subtle structural geometries referencing the fading checkerboards and grids found in medieval churches.

In his recent series inspired by the ninth-century manuscript De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis, Lang merges historical reverence with contemporary technology. The manuscript’s grid-like design becomes a template for his own word-search-like compositions, in which AI-generated scriptural quotations occupy the painted surface. This act of translation - across centuries, mediums, and intentions—situates Lang’s work in a generative tension: between loss and recovery, faith and doubt, the human and the algorithmic.

Rather than attempting to reconstruct the past, Lang’s practice gestures toward a fragmented faith - a spiritual and aesthetic longing that persists without certainty. His works do not preach or resolve. Instead, they create space: for slowness, for looking, for mystery. Dust and Devotion offers a meditation on what remains - after the pigment has faded, the story fractured, and belief itself called into question.

Percival, 2024

In Percival, Lang extends his dialogue with medieval image-making into the mythic terrain of Arthurian legend. The canvas depicts the knight Perceval at the charged moment of his encounter with the Holy Grail. But Lang’s approach is not illustrative - instead, he pares the narrative down to atmosphere and gesture. The figure kneels within the imagined Castle of the Fisher King, head bowed, body in profile, face frontal - a posture that simultaneously withdraws and confronts.

Beneath the painted surface lies a chequered grid, collaged into the canvas before the first brushstroke was laid. This base structure, drawn from the geometries of medieval murals, offers a quiet architectural rhythm, a scaffolding of order beneath the devotional image. Over it, Lang applies layers of impasto acrylic and wood dust, using flat brushes to create a surface that is more carved than painted. The tactility of the work speaks to his interest in material as relic - dust as both residue and building block.

Percival resists narrative closure. There is no Grail in sight, no miracle or revelation. Instead, Lang renders the inward stillness of the moment - the waiting, the not-knowing, the breath held between worlds. The ambiguity is intentional: a pause rather than a conclusion, a fragment rather than a fresco. While medieval in form, the painting bears traces of the contemporary: in its technique, in its engagement with digital symmetry, and in its quiet insistence on stillness as a radical act.

Images: ©James Lang, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: MIAO