Soft When Warm: Leo Costelloe and Deividas Vytautas: Curated by Helen Neven

Guts Projects presents Soft When Warm, a two-person show of new and existing work by artists Leo Costelloe and Deividas Vytautas curated by Helen Neven. The exhibition takes as its starting point the artists’ shared use of glass and metal in their practices - materials both soft and malleable when subjected to heat, transforming to sharp and potentially dangerous matter when cooled. The transformative process native to their materials stands as a further metaphor for their subject matters, which investigate notions of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, the ambivalence of their natures, and in turn their subversive potential.

In her 2020 essay Soft Femme Theory: Femme Internet Aesthetics and the Politics of “Softness”, Andi Schwartz uses “soft” to denote a prevalent aesthetic within internet subculture: ‘What I have come to term “softness”—a combination of hyperfemininity, emotionality, relationality, and vulnerability—shows up in femme Internet culture in a number of ways […] As an aesthetic, softness employs hyperfeminine symbols (like bows, flowers, pastel colors, and baby animals) frequently organized in a visually soothing manner.’ Schwartz crucially goes on to attribute political agency to so-called soft imagery in its resistance to neoliberal, masculinist logics, particularly when deployed by queer and fem-identifying individuals. 

Leo Costelloe’s sculptural practice draws from a lexicon of comparable, historically feminine signifiers, their apparent softness undercut by a material dissonance implying an underlying fragility or an uncharacteristic hardness. Hair bows made of glass and a Venutian sterling silver doll flank an extravagantly iced birthday cake. By quoting from the language of decoration, Costelloe interrogates the ways in which such adornment is culturally read as inherently feminine - existing solely to enhance and ornament - and proposes a concurrent disruptive potential. Informed by his experiences go-go dancing, Costelloe further corrupts the trappings of desirability in a set of unwearable copper-woven lingerie and a thick, wall-hung weft of beribboned golden hair - Hollywood’s cinematic blonde bombshell, archetype of sexy docility and soft femininity, here laden, armour-clad and unexpectedly weapon-like.

Overtly weapon-like is a new steel sculpture by Deividas Vytautas, its sharp, fluid forms drawing as much from medieval warcraft as from the tribal tattoo design on a brawny Slavic arm. Vytautas locates his converging interests in violence, desire, spirituality and pop culture in his experiences being ‘a little gay boy from Eastern Europe’, a locus as much for fantasy as for the real-world tensions between notions of dominance and submission which overarch Vytautas’ practice. These tensions are spectrally implicit in two prints drawn from pornography stills, petrifying vulnerable, ephemeral gestures, simultaneously tender, romantic, and performed. The title of one, Don't make me sad, don't make me cry…, 2023, invokes the lyrics of Lana Del Rey’s 2012 nihilistic sad girl ballad ‘Born To Die’, at once dread-drenched and perversely gleeful. These dualities of innocence and knowing are crystallised in a final third print in which a crouching snowy white lamb smiles sardonically out to the viewer; traditionally a symbol of both suffering and triumph, the lamb in this context seems to take on new agency; soft fleece and soft power.

 Schwartz, A. (2020). Soft Femme Theory: Femme Internet Aesthetics and the Politics of “Softness.” Social Media + Society, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120978366

Leo Costelloe (b.1993) is an Australian-born artist living and working in London. His work in blown glass, metal and silversmithing explores the transient and sentimental nature of objects. Drawing inspiration from popular culture, spiritual practice and personal experience, Costelloe creates sculptural works that situate themselves in a liminal space somewhere between beauty and banality. Costelloe graduated from Central Saint Martins with a BA (Hons) in Jewellery Design.

Deividas Vytautas (b.1996) is a Lithuanian American artist working and living in London. His interdisciplinary practice spans video, performance, installation, sculpture, and print; all disciplines which Vytautas sees contributing to an overall world-building project. His performance-based moving-image work tight grip, it makes me feel safe (2021) was produced by the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius and won the JCDecaux Award 2021. In 2022, Vytautas graduated from Royal College of Art with an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice.

Helen Neven is a Belgian-born independent curator and artist based in London. Neven graduated from the Courtauld Institute of Art before gaining an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art. From 2016 to 2021, she was head of research and exhibitions assistant at Blenheim Art Foundation where she delivered large-scale exhibitions by Jenny Holzer, Maurizio Cattelan, Yves Klein, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cecily Brown and Tino Sehgal. Neven has since independently curated a number of exhibitions in London, notably at House of St Barnabas, Harlesden High Street Gallery, Ugly Duck and The Residence Gallery. Her writing has been published in Conde Nast Traveller. Her research looks at the intersection of philosophy and pop culture, representation, identity and subculture.