The Artist is Present

Intimacy, awareness, sexuality and repulsion are tangled together within the second group show at Guts Gallery HQ. Using painting, ‘The Artist is Present’ dissects our perceptions of reality, confronting our preconceived beliefs, ideas and illusions. Visual imagery is introduced as a focal point for sincerity. Vulnerabilities are explored, while modes of escapism and separation from the anticipated, calculated and expected are traversed. 

Various paintings are dressed with intimate scenes plucked from the heart of unguarded interactions. Cinematic stills anamnestically evoke nostalgia of supposed previous existences, maybe our memories or those of another. Subjects are washed in tones that seem to summon almost synesthetic associations. We clumsily mend the fractured characteristics. Connecting them, we reveal responses that mask the nuances of emotion and the self, the realities of every individual.

Dreams and nightmares manifest in waking moments; ambivalence dances with contempt, horror and revulsion, delight, pride or perhaps arbitrary indifference reflecting our daily observations that emerge from assumed truths.

Certainty is not quite persistent; as it steadily emerges like water from a lost-forgotten aquifer, experiences are swept to the foreground. We anticipate immediacy, however, as we are slowly acknowledged by the shifting intensities, thoughts and actions are given the space to converge.

Noun

The present, The most immediate moment of your life.

Verb

To present, Manifesting imagination through expression.

Adjective

Is present, To be at the forefront of your perception.

Words by Moriah Ogunbiy