Exhibition at Tension Fine Art – 9th Jan 2020
Thanks to all who attended my group show preview with three other members of the SE20 Group. What a great night. “Foursight, and everything in between”
Press Release Artist biographies:
Mary Gordon-Smith is originally from the Isle of Sheppey and now lives in Sydenham. She has been drawing from observation in cafes and other public spaces around South and Central London for the last few years. Her focus is the body language of people interacting in public spaces, either with each other or the various devices they bring with them. Places designed for transient pleasure or work create an inclusive environment where an artist can draw unobserved. Mary uses her drawings as basis for these paintings. The results can be surprising, as visual record competes with memory, original compositions and colours are adapted to larger formats and new meanings emerge.
James O’Hara is a Northern Irish artist living in Penge since 1990. He started life drawing sessions with an Ipad four years ago, and now as a venture away from traditional nude drawings James has created a style of his own. His works, in some instances, are created through the destruction of previous work in an effort to find a finished piece. James is a regular exhibiter in Penge, Crystal Palace, Sydenham and Tooting. He won a prize for the most original artwork at the recent ‘Life on Film’ event. The “Foursight, and everything in between” exhibition has provided James with an opportunity to exhibit these unique creations.
Angele Lautier comes originally from Malta. Her paintings and sculptures are the product of her response to her immediate surroundings; be it a gesture in a conversation or a headline in the news. Her way to express these ideas is to link them to an autobiographical situation or pursue research which will inform her work. She then playfully upsets the concept by applying a surreal approach together with an unexpected colour palette as well as flat forms and symbols. Her interest in human interaction and behaviour is evident in her work through narrative and dialogue between the elements in the composition.
Angele graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in 2009 in Fine Art, Sculpture, and currently teaches Art and Design Foundation. As a practising artist, she enjoys the balance of teaching, curating, exhibiting and undertaking commissions.
Walter Hayn is originally from South Africa, and has lived in Penge for over 20 years. His paintings on canvas, and sculptures, are the culmination of many drawings on paper. His recent work is mostly monochromatic and textural mark-making (either in oil paints or silicone) his primary visual vocabulary. Walter’s concerns are explored as an outworking of his Christian faith within the context of the exploration of identity stemming from his experiences growing up in Apartheid South Africa, and other life experiences both past and current.
Walter completed a BA in fine art at Durban University of Technology, and a PGCE and Masters degree in Art and Design education at UCL Institute of Education. He currently divides his time between a studio practice and part-time art teaching at a school in Brockley.
Foursight, and everything in between Tension Fine Art 10 January to 1 February 2020
When Ken Turner (Tension Fine Art) invited four artists from the SE20 group to exhibit in January 2020, it seemed to the artists at first, perhaps, to be a somewhat curious and awkward amalgamation. However, as the artists began to tentatively discuss a title for the exhibition and present their offerings of artwork towards the show (a WhatsApp group becoming the platform for a shared digital mini ‘work-in-progress’ display), a spark of excitement was ignited. It emerged that whilst the artworks were quite visually diverse, there were intriguing conceptual links to ponder. Out of this realisation, the title began to crystallise. “Foursight, and everything in between.”
Four differing ‘visions’ are on show here, and whilst each stand on their own merit it is the spaces (the dialogue) between the works which form additional narratives. It is worth noting that the artists all come from different backgrounds and countries, and their styles and disciplines have developed separately from each other out of unique interests and circumstances. Nevertheless, there are reverberations between the works.
Mary’s translation of closely observed ‘life’ drawings into larger paintings which become expressive intimate explorations of her own relationship as a deaf person to her environment and the people who inhabit it, echoes with how Angele responds to the world around her. Angele also responds to her environment, “be it a gesture…or a headline”, and she translates this in an intimate way in flat colourful paintings which become at once playful and surreal, and yet remain ambiguously serious images.
In a similar way, Walter translates his own life experiences, Scripture, or contemporary concerns through the prism of a personal inner vision, resulting in abstracted work, but with ambiguous visual links to real things. James reverses this process and begins with a visual ‘life experience’ (as does Mary) in the way he might sometimes start with the drawing of a posed model, but then he ‘destroys’, and re-works the image, personalising it until it is something quite removed from the original. Sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, but always an intriguing digital image.
On a purely visceral level the works also reverberate with each other… Walter’s pieces attempt to suck the colour from the room, but James’ work keeps providing it… Mary promotes line and texture but Angele’s work denies it… this exhibition has contrasts, similarities and stories ‘in between’, and will keep a visitor busy!
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This is one of three new paintings of that was on exhibition @tensionfineart . Space time continuum is a mathematical model that joins space and time into a single idea called a continuum. Further theories show that space time continuum is a way to transfer between dimensions, provided the continuum is ‘ripped’, which creates a hole between each dimension. I find that these mathematical/physics models provide exciting rationales for the outcomes of faith and spiritual experiences, and have explored these ideas in numerous pieces, of which this is one.
Silicone on canvas. Approx 72cm X 89cm
Walter Hayn 