Exhibition “With These Eyes“

SEPTEMBER 06 – SEPTEMBER 28, 2024
Exhibited works: Click here

Hosted by JARILAGER Gallery Seoul, the group exhibition With These Eyes presents a curated selection of paintings by Roy Aurinko, Kim Booker, Alexander Dik, Florence Hutchings, Spiller+Cameron, and Trude Viken. With These Eyesrevisits the gallery’s mission to foster cross-pollination and meaningful exchange among artists. The exhibition highlights different practices of portrait painting today. In a world as diverse as contemporary art, where finding reassuring unities or identifying clear genres is difficult, portraiture does not seem to have lost its traditional magic. Rather, how we see ourselves and each other in an age of exponential media exposure has become one of the most prevailing questions. With These Eyes offers a refreshing approach to find answers.

The photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz believed that portraiture painting would become obsolete throughout the beginning of the 20th century. He asserted that by the time ‘photographers will have learned something about portraiture in its deeper sense,’ the mastery of painting portraits would no longer be pursued by artists. However, history proved him wrong. Today, the genre is still full of potential.

With accurate representations no longer a responsibility, contemporary painters look at portraiture with new eyes. They dissolve unpredictable barriers between internal and external landscapes to bring forth singular experiences of the figure: in and out of body and mind. Portraits become privileged spaces for expressionist, imaginative, abstract, political, and existential explorations of what it means and what it looks like to be human. Notions of marginality and alienation, dreams of androgynous and gestural forms move to the centre. Just like in present technology-driven times, identities change fast, bodies are charged with bold and subversive energy, transformation and flux. Canvases incandesce and brim with poetic life.

With These Eyes integrates paintings from different inspirations and artistic subcultures. Shapeshifting from enigmatic forms of beings and things to peaks of abstract and geometric expression, the works on display bring to focus connected themes: the face as a mask, the individual as a mirror of their surroundings, and the self as a multitude.

Spiller+Cameron create abstract, sentinel-type portraits, known as Heads or Constellations, that blend formal precision with a shamanistic sensibility. Their meticulous process involves encoding humanoid faces into the works through repeated patterns and deliberate symmetries. This method, reflecting influences from Primitivism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, infuses their pieces with both compelling mystery and a deep, almost spiritual resonance.

Trude Viken’s portraits are exaggerated, hefty, laughable, tragic, and absurd – and can be seen as collective images of people today. Viken expresses many-faceted ranges of feelings, with a darkness and honesty that appeal to viewers because they recognise themselves. Her faces have developed into fantasies of how we feel behind our more-or-less successful facades.

Echoing Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the home as ‘our first universe,’ Florence Hutchings reflects her personal self through abstract themes of domesticity and plants. She loves the mundane, the poetry of ordinary shapes that appear, reappear, and transform into evocative biomorphic entities. The colour red is accorded centre stage here. Symbolically loaded, red calls to mind the fluidity of blood, femininity, as well as feelings such as tenderness and passion.

Roy Aurinko’s highly abstract paintings have a sense of danger and brutal beauty. Painting, for Aurinko, is like a jazz improvisation. Thematically, his body of work functions as an interrupted portrait, challenging viewers to reflect on fragmentation, loss of connection, and the longing for impossible conversations.

Kim Booker’s and Alexander Dik’s signature use of the human figure reveals how pain can be transformed into empowering experiences, and beauty can bloom amidst apparent chaos. Whereas Booker’s dreamy women-silhouettes stand loosely in the middle of the canvas, trying to get closer and support each other, Dik’s figures often dissolve into one another, losing their distinct forms and creating dynamic vortices of colours that blur the boundaries of identity.

For as long as people have been making art, they have been portraying themselves and their relationship with the world and others. It seems this story is far from over.

Vernissage
Friday, September 06, 2024 | 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM

JARILAGER Gallery
12 Eonju-ro 165-gil
Gangnam-gu
Seoul, South Korea

info (at) jarilagergallery.com
Tel. + 82 (0)10 8191 5834