Mr. & Mrs. Philip Cath and
Lovers
3—24 September 2016
All photos by Oskar
Proctor.
Courtesy the artists and Almanac,
London/Turin.
It is
an inverted possibility, making the medium of painting into a relational ethics
for the contemporary moment. The individual works are involved in this
propagation through an alchemical politics.
If there was
another mirror in Alice's drawing room - would that tripled space have come
close to the complexity and contradictions of contemporary life? The imagery of
the not-so-distant past repeats a practice of attention disguised as
interiority, and the object of bad taste is a warning that all is not as it
should be. When we look closely at the painting’s surface, we may discover a
portal through the personal into a new outward-facing language.
Perhaps the
distorting mirror/screen acts as a spirit animal for the modern - the digital
cricket on our shoulder whose background noise we can learn to decipher as a
shift in scale. The painting gazes out at us with the eyes of an insect,
revealing a multidimensional alternate space.
By breaking out
of the sphere, embracing the fragility of our own perception, a chimera is
formed that gestures across the schism of languages that could have been, an
oasis of impossibilities that is fruitful in the acknowledgement of the
darkness of the unconscious.
The weight of
history is held back by a spider’s web filigree of surfaces, and the constant
care of the witch-gardener releases the chemicals of negative consumption,
allowing for the articulation of the depth of emotions into a plane. If humans
can create emotional thresholds, so can paintings. And after all, the work
itself has crossed many thresholds to reach this stage.
The love we have
for the busts of reality that prop us up, help us function, and build on
invisible lives, gather and call for a response. The husbands and wives of
painters are frozen into casts of their love for the world, worked in to the
surfaces and stimulating swirls of material.
Becoming-with-painting,
unhelpful judgments fall away like shedded skins. A raw thought places itself
on the surface of this relation, a paper napkin absorbing the viciousness that
surrounds it, turning shadow.
Astrid
Korporaal