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The Sky's Gone Out

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Price Range: 
$1500 to
$10000
Date: 
Saturday, 7 April 2018 to Saturday, 28 April 2018
Opening: 
Friday, 6 April 2018 - 6:30pm to 8:30pm

From the very early days of painting, artists have translated light into paint, and have manipulated both to describe form, depth and mood. From the stark chiaroscuro of Rembrandt and Goya to the vibrant neon forms of Roberto Matta’s paintings from the 50s, light has not just been a subject, but has formed the very structural essence of painting.

 

Borrowing the title from the eighties music band Bauhaus, Easton and Hawtin use the title paradoxically to ask the questions, ‘where would we be without natural light, and do we even need it nowadays?’ querying if our relationship to light is now not just located in the global geographic territories of night and day, but how electric lighting illuminates at our whim, ensuring that we are no longer tied to the diurnal cycle. The light we recognise now may not be from the external geo-space but from the internal, introspective light of the screens that accompany us everywhere. The light of the sun, the original primary light source, has now even become a problem we need to control in order to better view the new light we have created. This exhibition explores how our relationship to light in the world has been affected by these changes and how painters have responded to these new optical conditions.

 

The exhibiting artists all explore notions of light within painting. Looking back to great masters of light from the Baroque period such as Caravaggio, Vermeer and Rembrandt; to the Romantic paintings of Turner, Friedrich and Grimshaw; all had a commonality, transforming paint to light and vice versa, although each adopted their own inventive and diversely different methods, and did so with dramatic intensity.

 

Artist ( Description ): 

The Artists...........

 

Bella Easton

‘Illusion of space through geometry and light is an aesthetic constant within my paintings.  Fragments of antique wallpaper designs from my home initiate these immersive theatrically lit spaces. The Rorschach like result is a coming together that may look like one complete object or view, but is actually a symmetrical dissection mirrored to form two halves. With light sources entering from opposite directions, a systematic deliberate perfection is controlled by an interference of incongruous glitches and borrowed light.

These timeless ethereal fabrications are further punctuated by a gradation of light that is overlaid with synthesised lens flare or obscured by blurred voids. A scratched, disturbed space forms giving clues and suggestions to an emerging landscape.’ 

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Vasilis Avramidis​

‘Most of my paintings are initially conceived as places, where landscape meets architecture or minimalist sculptural forms, under unorthodox conditions. Although the content may suggest a natural open-air environment, the light conditions used in most paintings remind of studio lighting, chiaroscuro, night photography, or a 17th century Dutch still life. This process takes the landscape idea to another direction, where elements like scale, environment and location become distorted, and their connection to reality and memory attempts to create a certain impact that is only possible within the world of painting.’ 

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John Greenwood

‘My intention is to inject images as far into people’s brains as I can and the method I use is to squidge, coax and sculpt dead pigment around until it magically fuses into an approximation of the entwined beauties of space and light. From this Alchemy I hope a spark of possibility leaps from me to you.’ 

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Rui Matsunaga

The small landscapes are depicted in twilight, like half light revealing a mythical, archetypal and altered reality. Some of them are inspired by old masterpieces of Christian paintings which sits on the story of Christianity’s control over nature. Light in the paintings are part of nature and also rooted in Japanese culture where the extreme light of 2 nuclear bombs exploded over cities made a major impact into the deep psyche, mutating the relationship and sensitivity toward light becoming both beneficial and toxic. The small creatures in Matsunaga’s paintings can be seen as a morphed projection of our human existence and explore’s our subtle, fragile, poetic and sometimes treacherous relationship to nature.

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Mimei Thompson​

‘One of my ongoing interests is in transforming familiar imagery into something strange, radiant, or poetic. In the worlds I construct, everything is connected and made of the same matter, which is fundamentally colour, energy and light. The paintings are worked in thin layers of translucent oil paint over a smooth white background, with the intention of producing a luminosity, which could be seen to reference both screen viewing, and light coming through coloured glass. My first degree was in photography, and I think in the work there is still an echo of the magic of the tradition of the darkroom and the negative, where obscurity and density switch to their counterparts of light and clarity, and vice versa. The cave works in particularly contain within them the simple opposites of dark and light- of going into, or coming out of the cave, with the cave itself standing for a space of retreat and transformation.‘   

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Chris Hawtin​

‘Light reveals the day. The sun, which we can’t look upon unveils everything else around us. To shed light on something is to reveal its logic, an enlightenment. It is what God called upon to reveal creation. It allows us to traverse the night, it tells you when to stop and when to go, it guides aeroplanes home and it gives us warnings to prevent disaster. It lights the screen image, those ubiquitous rectangular backlights that can’t be seen in the sunlight. It’s what unveils an image; enables it to be, to become something. It Illuminates the dust in the air, it is embers floating from fire, laser beams and it is what has travelled to us from stars even after they have died. Light is painted, covered and uncovered. Paint covers light and is scraped away, revealed. Layers of glazes change the tone of the light reflected beneath. Paintings are backlit. They are covered and unveiled.’ 

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John Greenwood​

‘My intention is to inject images as far into people’s brains as I can and the method I use is to squidge, coax and sculpt dead pigment around until it magically fuses into an approximation of the entwined beauties of space and light. From this Alchemy I hope a spark of possibility leaps from me to you.’ 

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Sean Dawson ​ 

‘Around 1980 I discovered both Bauhaus and Caravaggio. The stripped-back, stark black and white of Bauhaus’ early performances and Caravaggio’s paintings spoke to me of a ‘staged’ realism abstracted by extreme light and dark. This interest in chiaroscuro has stayed with me over the years. The ‘baroqueness’ of my earlier work could be seen to explore both the drama and mystery – the hidden and revealed - of a painted abstraction. My current paintings explore ideas of form and formlessness and are developed from expressive drawings. Spontaneous and partly observational, many of these drawings are made by the mystery of candlelight, or the drama of extreme sunlight and shadow. Looking at the seen against that which is unseen.’  

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Gordon Cheung ​

Ambiguous light in my work could be read as nuclear or the sun with lens flares and back lighting used to suggest vision through a mechanised eye and to dematerialise the certainty of a form. Sometimes auroras fill the skies, the sublime visible threats of solar winds being deflected by the Earth’s protective atmosphere. The skies are often the colours of light pollution from neon landscapes and the psychedelic palette implies perception altered by drugs or a world of consensual hallucinations. Constellations, the sun and the sky have traditionally been worshipped as Gods and used to navigate, map and conquer territories. 

Telephone: 
07713189249
Other Info: 

Gallery open Thursday to Sunday 3pm to 7pm or by appointment

instagram.com/arthouse1_london

Venue ( Address ): 

45 Grange Road

London

SE1 3BH

ARTHOUSE1 , London

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