GRAHAM FINK
NOMADS
PRIVATE VIEW: Wednesday 8 January 6-9pm9-22 January 2014
"l'image poétique devrait être plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air"
Paul Verlaine
As with poetic images, so it is with the visual. Indefinite and fluid, they are all around. The child sees a face in the moon, ghosts in the sand, where the abstract becomes figurative, the throwaway becomes profound, the imagined real.
Since childhood, filmmaker Graham Fink has seen faces; scratches in concrete, flaking paint, knots in the wood, clouds, fire; faces in everything. The apparitions grew and the spirits began to follow him. Like coincidental friendships, seeking freedom of expression in life as well as art. Fink recorded these 'found' characters, taking photographs everywhere he went. More than three thousand ghosts recorded over the years. The impact of an imagination deriving energy and meaning from an acutely sensitive response to the natural and supernatural world and the symbolism of the images which nature throws up.
Fink's debut exhibition NOMADS consists of twelve of the most insistent 'pareidolia',* printed onto the purest white marble. The medium radiates life through the layers amalgamated in the printing process, one of the oldest known to man. The spirits take on another existence, becoming at one with the stone. As with the aeolian harp, the music in the air, they are always waiting. All we have to do is look.
GRAHAM FINK's exhibition 'NOMADS' is at Riflemaker: January 2014.
www.riflemaker.org
* 'pareidolia' an imagined stimulus, image or sound which appears to be significant
Now
STUART PEARSON WRIGHT
'LOVE & DEATH'
"Stuart Pearson Wright's work is masterly and contemporary, as well as slightly unnerving and surreal" Sarah Howgate, contemporary curator, National Portrait Gallery, London
Stuart Pearson Wright (b. 1975) is considered the most gifted portraitist of his generation with twenty-seven paintings in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery
But Wright refers to his own paintings as 'pseudo portraits' presenting as they do a subject's 'inner state' rather than just an accurate record of their outward appearance. (ref: Phaidon's 'Painting Today' 2013: Stuart Pearson Wright: pages 37, 180, 437, 420).
The works in the new exhibition at Riflemaker, all made within a specially constructed 'blue room' within the artist's studio, offer a view of the human experience. Wright's powers of observation as a reluctant portraitist circumnavigate familiar stereotypes and settings to create genuinely moving and perceptive portraits of real individuals.