Hanging In The Balance: Lloyd Durling, Yuken Teruya, Masakatsu Kondo

About

Pippy Houldsworth is pleased to present Hanging In The Balance, bringing together the work of three young artists, Lloyd Durling, Masakatsu Kondo and Yuken Teruya. Although living as far a field as Berlin, London and New York, these artists are exploring similar issues, examining the meaning of landscape and the struggle characterizing our complex relationship with nature. Lloyd Durling's meticulously detailed drawings, using only ballpoint pen, are the product of obsessive repetition. Despite the arduous technique, there remains an undeniable delicacy. Each drawing is derived from an examination of the familiar — the interior of an acorn shell or the sinews of a dead leaf are subverted to reveal minute organisms or a more visceral analogy. These forms, seemingly drawn from recognisable sources, are turned inside out, abstracting the imagery from the specifics of time and place. In turn our sense of logic is propelled into disarray. Masakatsu Kondo's epic landscapes combine accurate representation with painterly gesture — a rhetorical tool used to divert the viewer from what we understand to be the real, and instead presenting us with an ideal scene. What results is a topography of the imagined, a space where the actual and the conceptual meet. The miniature worlds of Yuken Teruya are constructed via the process of inverting the expected use of everyday materials. By twisting, turning and manipulating paper, Teruya creates a microcosm of the forest from which the paper has come, and literally creates a landscape that is suspended within the material from which it has been made. Whilst this inherent paradox may serve to enlighten us, it also suggests that our own experience of nature is as manufactured as any other product of consumerism. Juxtapositions abound within the works on display, creating tensions between form and content, utopian ideals and current realities. These indeterminate landscapes leave us hanging in the balance, creating worlds where the possibilities are endless.