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Carl Kostyál is delighted to current a twin exhibition of recent works by Indonesian painter Roby Dwi Antono and English painter Felix Treadwell, each their debut London exhibitions with the gallery.
“We’re capable of finding every little thing in our reminiscence, which is sort of a dispensary or chemical laboratory by which likelihood steers our hand generally to a soothing drug and generally to a harmful poison.” —Marcel Proust À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913-1927
When Proust’s narrator, Marcel, eats the crumbs of a madeleine dipped in limeblossom tea, it triggers a strategy of remembering that brings his previous to life. At first the narrator describes himself as being struck in a approach that captures his consideration. He isn’t positive what this sudden consciousness means, however he conjectures that it was his tasting the madeleine soaked in tea that led to this startling feeling. He tastes it once more. The identical feeling happens. However when he tries a 3rd time, the sensation is diminished. After a lot effortful focus, Marcel lastly comes to understand why the tasting expertise is so potent: it’s anchored by a long-buried reminiscence that’s progressively delivered to the floor of consciousness. At this level the narrator remembers his aunt Léonie’s bed room, the place on Sundays she would soak items of madeleine in her limeblossom tea. He remembers the previous gray home in Combray, the gardens, the streets and the sq. of the small city. From this starting comes the vastoutpouring of Marcel’s reminiscences of his previous life. Goals and reminiscences – of their childhood, of loneliness and salvation from it, of moments of happiness, of melancholy and of the cloak of ever-present existential angst – are the weather that infuse the works of each Dwi Antono and Treadwell, connecting them in a approach that’s directly poetic and surprising.
The act of drawing, central to each their practices, is in plentiful evidencehere – strains drawn with daring and voluptuous strokes, tracing the hazy types of these involuntary reminiscences on canvas, bringing them to new life. That is portray that seeks to specific a non-public, inside world – these in any other case unstated, ungraspable ideas which are typically extra vivid to us, and felt extra profoundly, than our ‘actual’ worlds.
Dwi Antono, whose wild-eyed childlike faces, richly rendered in an acid, nearly neon palette of thick oil-stick, stare out at us, over-sized, wild, at instances fearful or playful – their disproportionate, irregular strains filled with vitality and immediacy, his compositions imaginative, naïve, and spontaneous – has described, in Proustian element, an identical reminiscence, acutely poignant as a result of it marks what he remembers of the beginnings of his creative self:
“Again in main college, after I wished to go and play with my mates, I might go go to my father in his blacksmith workshop to ask for pocket cash. At the moment, he was one amongst many blacksmiths in my village and I can nonetheless vividly image how busy the workshops have been. That small bamboo home was dwelling to the distinctive smells of heated metal being moulded into family and farming instruments. The rhythm of the rattling and thumping of iron bars slowly turned music to my ears. Outdoors the workshop, there was an enormous tree and beneath its shade, clients would sit on an previous teak bench, ready for my father to restore their instruments. I favored to choose just a few items of charcoal from the piles mendacity round, ready for use as sizzling coals to melt the iron. I used that charcoal
to doodle on the streets within the village.”
He has described these works as his try and convey again the soul of a kid which will have been misplaced, to go to the reminiscences floating on the floor and to dive deep into these buried under. Their vivid and gestural power is paying homage to the CoBrA artist Karel Appel, who, like Dwi Antono, tried to return the mark making of a kid, to avoid grownup logic and mind in his
portray.
“All grown-ups have been as soon as youngsters….however just a few of them bear in mind it.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943.
Felix Treadwell’s work have a wistfulness about them, a dream-like sweetness. Their grounds are flat and uniformly monochrome. His younger protagonists’ figures limbs loom with the sculptural presence of Brancusi or Moore, filling the image airplane, their heads small. They sit, stand or transfer in infantile marvel, collectively or alone, the hopefulness of a rainbow held of their hand. They’re suspended in area, typically wrapped or sure collectively in concord – right here, they seem to have discovered peace, albeit a considerably melancholic one. “I suppose, in my work, I’ve at all times been returning to my childhood or youth and and eager for one thing I needed or wished to have, how nostalgia impacts one.”
The hypnotic, other-worldly presence of his figures stems partly from their fluid motion, created with a mixture of spray and acrylic paint in a intentionally muted, light palette. Of their stasis and quasi-abstracted type, they recall the exaggerated element of Domenico Gnoli, the trippy innocence and awkwardness of Zebedee, Ermintrude and Doogal within the British youngsters’s tv collection The Magic Roundabout (BBC, 1965), greater than an aesthetic of the post-digital age, however their simplicity is equally misleading. These pareddown compositions are an antidote to the velocity and surfeit of images we’re subjected to day by day through social and different media, permitting for a slowing down, a second of quieter contemplation, their deliberate simplicity each soothing and
intriguing.
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