Private View and Publication Launch: Friday 26 April 6- 9pm
Exhibition from 26 April to 6 May 10-5pm
This exhibition is about returning to place. This is not a complete
journey. Rather, it marks a start by asking how we return to place and
at what point we begin to do so. Artists Theodore Ereira-Guyer and
Abraham Kritzman make work that engages with specific locations that
enmesh personal history, memory, myth and sensory experience.
Kritzman’s paintings and Ereira-Guyer’s etchings took the artists
back to their ancestral lands and to the potential for a re-creation
of these places. In conversations ahead of the exhibition it became
apparent that place, in tension with geography and imagination, could
become the ‘common ground’ between their practices.
The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote that ‘the world
is a text containing several meanings, and we pass from one meaning to
another by an effort – an effort in which the body always
participates’. Weil described bodily perceptions as being as
meaningful as the matter of reality itself. Viewed through this lens
and considering the artists’ production, place contains several
affective, symbolic and embodied layers. The pieces on show seem to
express the effort in making sense of these multiple entanglements
through the idiosyncrasies of painting and printmaking.
Abraham Kritzman presents a series of oil paintings on wood panels and
canvas, inspired by his visit to the city of Piatra Neamț in Romania
in 2015, alongside woodcuts that reimagine the biblical figure of
Nimrod. His artworks are fragments pointing at the impossibility of
ever achieving a comprehensive picture. Yet their nuances recur and
repeat over separate surfaces. Traces and intuitions are never dropped
and instead emerge transformed elsewhere, in a way that resembles how
memories and impressions superimpose on place.
Theodore Ereira-Guyer’s etchings evoke multifarious configurations
of both familiar places in Portugal and landscapes unknown to the
artist, simultaneously conveying his manipulation of and longing for
these locations. There is a tension shifting along his porous
surfaces, which at times seems to pierce the paper. The blurry quality
resulting from the printing process characterises the entrance into a
scene which is alluded to but not clearly defined. Place seems to come
onto the printing plate as inexhaustible potential rather than an
image, or a definition, that can be owned.
In the book accompanying this exhibition writers Lucy Biddle, Giulia
Damiani and Nicholas Usherwood take the imagery of the show further
and into their practices. Their reflections, at once evocative and
elaborate, sit alongside new artworks by the artists. Places make
continuous and reversible time available to us; they condense history
but they also trigger alternative narratives. This shared perception
was another territory of convergence in the preparation for this
exhibition. Philosopher Michel Serres said that dynamism shapes the
route from the present to history; and this dynamism, the folding and
unfolding of time, could be made sense of by looking at geographical
coastlines or the fringe of a mass of clouds. We hope our bodies and
gazes will return there.
Elizabeth Xi Bauer at the Arthill Gallery
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07/05/2019 Last update