Each of Jeremy Houghton’s bewitching flamingo paintings offers a glimpse into a secret space, a hidden world where nature roams and saunters. By uncovering the flamboyant drama of the flamingos, Houghton’s work revivifies our mundane, utilitarian relationship with the natural world.

The flamingo has appeared fleetingly throughout Western cultural history, an elusive creature that crops up as shorthand for all that is exotic and extraordinary. When Lewis Carroll’s Alice uses a live flamingo as a mallet at the Queen of Heart’s croquet game, the bird’s appearance in this world of nonsense seems utter common sense.

Why wouldn’t you, in the midst of fantasy and unreason, play croquet with a flamingo? The association of flamingos with both royalty and childhood has echoes in Kirk Munroe’s nineteenth-century children’s novel ‘The Flamingo Feather’. Here, the eponymous totem lies in the headdress of a tragic Indian chieftain’s son, Has-se, serving as the symbol of a decaying, luxuriant power. On Has-se’s death, inheriting the flamingo feather allows our young hero Réné to become “Ta-lah-lo-ko,” the white chief of the tribe. The flamingo seems to pre-date the age of reason, symbolising a fantasy of power and beauty at odds with modernity and adulthood.

But this account of the flamingo is perhaps too analytical to appreciate its appearance in Houghton’s paintings, where it embarks on a journey of pure emotion and imagination. Biological and historical descriptions of the flamingo will not do; these are not the anatomically detailed animals of naturalists’ diagrams. ‘The Flamingo’s Smile’, a witty, elusive essay by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, firmly locates the bird in the twin firmaments of cultural history and evolutionary biology. He describes the Roman emperors’ use of flamingo tongues in their banquets (an early instance of the royal proclivity for the birds), before explaining the evolutionary development of the flamingo’s distinctive ‘smile’. Houghton’s flamingos escape from this empirical context, emerging in a visionary space that, with its resplendent colours, often appears far from the sun-bleached African plains where Houghton paints. Houghton’s flamingos flee from time and space, but while doing so they resonate with images from the most curious places – a fashion show, the ballet, the streets of a town heaving with drunken, underdressed girls. Referencing Western material culture, Houghton’s irreverent titles (‘Hook, Line and Banker’, ‘Girls Get in for Free’, ‘Getting Diggy With It’) reinforce these echoes.