“As I took her arm she stared through my face at the dark branches of the trees over my head”, Curated by Michael Lawton, YELLOW, Varese, Italy
Event Type:
Opening
Location:
YELLOW, Viale San Pedrino 4, Varese
Date:
January 28, 2018 - March 04, 2018
Time:
every day by appointment
Christiane Bergelt, Olarn Chiaravanont, Michael Lawton, Rasmus Nilausen, Catherine Parsonage, Ross Taylor
Curated by Michael Lawton
"The information on the walls was arranged so densely it was difficult to see individual items, it was a mess of symbols and images, of photographs, notes and paintings. There were representations of everything, a greasy pillow, Nordic House, a haircut, there were flying things to disrupt surveillance, lamplighters, scalphunters, shoemakers, parts of bodies pinned together with stumps jutting out, a croissant, markings that formed a kind of grate. Dissemblance and figuration, gigantic floating franken-symbols, small icons, the votive, the iconoclastic, politics, botany, the aquatic, hobbies, male pattern baldness, growing plants, a vessel of some kind, a stomach swilling and churning, paintings gone bad, a painting going well, a lone shoe in the street, a monster, a knight, an angel, mutterings and anti-mandalas, a waterfall".
From “The Polycephalus”
“As I took her arm she stared through my face at the dark branches of the trees over my head” is an exhibition that gathers together the work of six painters for whom words; written, read, spoken or forgotten, act as stimuli to their painting practice. The show explores this liminal area between the visual and the literary, the painted and the written; the point when one becomes the other or doesn’t or can’t.
The six painters think about how they might answer the question of how to paint about writing. Michael Lawton has curated the exhibition and written an accompanying text, “The Polycepahlus,” representative of his research. The hypothesis of this research is that the best writing to accompany an artwork is a work of fiction, narratives that exist in the world that the viewer enters when they encounter the artwork: texts written for paintings rather than about them. The world of this particular narrative has been further inspired by interviews conducted with the five other artists in the preceding months.
Click on the link and find out more about the show.