Luke Edward Hall’s solo exhibition at Patricia Low Contemporary, Venice, was set in ‘The Silver Vale’, a place where mythology and personal identity merge, where landscape and fantasy dissolve into one another. The exhibition presented new paintings created by Hall in his Oxfordshire studio. The starting point for this new body of work was the large painting There Was a Spirit Hidden in the Rustling Trees and the Grass Under His Feet made in September 2024 – a vision of Pan, the Greek god of the wild, leading a figure into a glowing, dreamlike woodland. This moment of initiation, at once intimate and ecstatic, became the catalyst for a series of paintings and drawings that examine queer identity through the lens of mythology and nature.

Hall’s paintings echoed the themes of E.M. Forster’s 1912 short story The Story of a Panic, in which the god Pan appears to a young outcast named Eustace, transforming him irrevocably. Forster’s tale has been interpreted as an allegory for queer revelation, a reading that resonates deeply with Hall. Pan, in his works, is both a seducer and a liberator, leading figures away from the constraints of the ordinary world and into a heightened, transcendent existence. But perhaps Pan is not external at all – perhaps he represents something internal, something required to embrace the self fully and without hesitation. In the artist’s words, Pan “represents the courage needed to live a life separate, apart, wonderful.”

The landscapes Hall conjured – fields awash in gold, rivers of lilac, skies charged with impossible pinks – drew from real locations, particularly Devon and Cornwall, but were rendered through his own imagined, mythic lens. The Silver Vale, an invented setting within his works, is a site of queer refuge, where identity is unfixed, fluid, and free.