Louise Giovanelli, Leonor Serrano Rivas, Sofia Silva
11 January - 16 February, 2019
Arcade
87 Lever Street
London EC1V 3RA
Like a ballet The Dream Follows the Mouth brings together works by Louise Giovanelli, Leonor Serrano Rivas and Sofia Silva that repurpose classical aesthetic forms and poises.
Entrée
A tryptic of blown glass sculptures by Leonor Serrano Rivas are suspended fluctuate in the space. These enhanced bodies of glass with their metal bones are static but their dynamic shadows dance in the space through a programmed lighting sequence. Light brings life, and animates the bodies of the mute dancers, inhaling and swelling their bellies to define the rhythm of silence.
Adagio
Louise Giovanelli’s pair of paintings follow on to the scene – ambiguous images that recall renaissance sculpture or Oriental Buddhas. The artist observes and collects, appropriates and transforms. Light has its presence in these works too: the colour and its opacity give an ethereal atmosphere to the paintings, varying repetitions like a fading memory. Giovanelli leaves a track behind: painted shards reveal to us that what we are viewing has already been looked at, and filtered for us.
Variations
Sofia Silva’s turn now. The lines populating the surface reveal figurative subjects. The scene is still, but the recurrent motif of the stairs and the use of vertical lines give a sense of direction, a movement. There is a another mute character in the painting. With its eyes closed he listens, and dreams…
Coda