Af­ter more than two decades of show­cas­ing his work at the Soft­box Gallery in St Clair, cel­e­brat­ed ab­stract ex­pres­sion­ist Rex Dixon is tak­ing view­ers to the heart of his cre­ative uni­verse, his stu­dio in the lush Mara­cas Val­ley. Nes­tled in a val­ley of the North­ern Range, Dixon’s home and gar­den will host An­gels and Stargaz­ing, his newest ex­hi­bi­tion open­ing to­day.

The shift in lo­ca­tion, ac­cord­ing to long-time cu­ra­tor Nisha Ho­sein, is more than a change of scenery. It of­fers view­ers the rare op­por­tu­ni­ty to en­counter Dixon’s work in the very place where his ideas are born, shaped by moon­light, mem­o­ry, and philo­soph­i­cal in­quiry.

“Every­thing about this ex­hi­bi­tion is about con­nect­ing space, both per­son­al and cos­mic,” Dixon says. “It’s the most fit­ting set­ting for this body of work.” Span­ning the years 2024 to 2025, An­gels and Stargaz­ing re­flects the artist’s on­go­ing di­a­logue with lit­er­a­ture, mem­o­ry, and meta­phys­i­cal themes.

“My work con­tin­ues to be in­volved with text,” Dixon ex­plains, ref­er­enc­ing Pea Green Boat, a paint­ing in­spired by Ed­ward Lear’s whim­si­cal 19th-cen­tu­ry po­em The Owl and the Pussy­cat—a child­hood favourite. Oth­er pieces draw on per­son­al his­to­ry, like Mes­sage Bob, a trib­ute to his fos­ter broth­er and the qui­et lega­cies left by those who have passed.

But Dixon’s gaze now stretch­es be­yond Earth. In what he calls a po­et­ic twist of fate, three of his paint­ings—Reck­less Eye­balling, The Sun­ny Side, and Wave—have been se­lect­ed for dig­i­tal preser­va­tion and place­ment on the Moon. The works will be trans­formed in­to nanofiche, an ana­log archival medi­um, and de­liv­ered aboard a lu­nar mod­ule fol­low­ing their ex­hi­bi­tion at the Fu­ture of Hu­man­i­ty art show in Davos, Switzer­land ear­li­er this year.

“It was un­can­ny,” Dixon says. “I was al­ready paint­ing stars and moons when the in­vi­ta­tion came. It tied in per­fect­ly with the ex­trater­res­tri­al themes I was ex­plor­ing, even Blake’s vi­sion of an­gels in a tree at Peck­ham Rye.”

In­spired by both ce­les­tial mys­tery and hu­man mem­o­ry, Dixon’s new works tra­verse ques­tions of lega­cy, sen­sa­tion, and artis­tic trans­for­ma­tion. One stand­out, Night Flow­ers, at­tempts to evoke not just the look but the smell of blos­soms un­der a trop­i­cal night sky.

“Can one cap­ture scent or even taste in a paint­ing?” he mus­es. At 86, Dixon is can­did about lega­cy: “I’m not dwelling, but I am think­ing about what I leave be­hind. That ques­tion haunts all artists.”

He com­pares his think­ing to that of JMW Turn­er, who want­ed his work kept to­geth­er to show the pro­gres­sion of his life through art. “Of course, that didn’t hap­pen,” he says with an in­fec­tious smile. A no­table shift in this lat­est body of work is a turn to­ward pointil­lism.

“Licht­en­stein-like,” Dixon notes, but still laced with the ges­ture and un­pre­dictabil­i­ty that have de­fined his style. “I try to sur­prise my­self,” he adds, ref­er­enc­ing a com­ment by film­mak­er and crit­ic Bruce Padding­ton. “I’m con­stant­ly push­ing against cliché, even the cliché of be­ing a ‘trop­i­cal’ artist.” Dixon’s vi­su­al lan­guage has evolved along­side a life of move­ment, from Lon­don to Birm­ing­ham, Ire­land, Ja­maica, and fi­nal­ly Trinidad. This jour­ney, he says, has shaped an iden­ti­ty that re­fus­es to be pinned down by ge­og­ra­phy. “The paint­ings are about states of mind, not just places.”

In the end, the most cos­mic of ques­tions re­turns to the most in­ti­mate of spaces—the stu­dio in the val­ley, where a paint­ing’s cor­ner can rep­re­sent a galaxy, and a child­hood po­em can trav­el to the Moon.

An­gels and Stargaz­ing opens to the pub­lic to­day at Rex Dixon’s stu­dio and gallery, Mara­cas Val­ley, St Joseph.