Beauty never was a dirty word to David Armstrong. Untroubled by a puritan fear of sensuality and the follies of any kind of zeitgeist, he has pursued his twin vision of urban romance and bucolic serenity. Armstrong’s images present his landscapes, interiors, and cityscapes, wistful and evocative images that discreetly suggest stories of love and loss, and the solitary pleasures of a flaneur adrift on urban streets and rural roads.

A street corner, the facade of a skyscraper, blossoming trees, a chair in a room on a late afternoon: These are the elusive quotidian promises of happiness that Armstrong elegantly captures, generously inviting the viewers to interweave their desires and reveries with his own intricately languid images. Underlying Armstrong’s radical aestheticism, we sense the utopian fervor of a revolt against utilitarianism, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and the stifling fear of the senses and the body that still pervades our culture.