Exhibition
AMANDA BENSON and EUGENIA CUELLAR, 'Skin Deep'
1 Jun 2023 – 25 Jun 2023
Regular hours
- Thursday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Friday
- 12:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Sunday
- 12:00 – 17:00
Free admission
Address
- 57a Redchurch Street
- London
- E2 7DJ
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- 8,67,149,242,243,388
- Liverpool Street / Old Street and Shoreditch High St. overground
New painting and sculpture - 'Skin Deep'
About
That's BEAUTY of course. The seduction of the surface, enticing us to the point where we don't consider, don't even care, what else there might be, where we might get to if we ever get beneath it. Which, of course, we never will. Glowing and burnished, Rihanna's smooth shoulder is offered up to us... for what? In the same single movement it invites and forbids. Noli me tangere, 2022-style. You can look all you want... It's a kind of visual pun, since the message is offered to us in paint. We mustn't touch the painting of the star we can't touch.
With Eugenia Cuellar in painting after painting it's Beauty indeed, but according to a very precise definition. Not in opposition to any co-dependent Beast, these are women presenting themselves to the world. Another pun: Cuellar's view of Kirsten Dunst as seen by Sofia Coppola as Marie Antoinette. Posed, there's a poise they're only just maintaining. Any minute the facade could crumble, separating display from attraction.
In Amanda Benson's sculptures (is that quite the word?) it's as if the catastrophe has already happened, but there's a survival, of sorts. Clumsy, gritty, faintly intimidating, their lack of appeal is balanced by their actuality. The tottering towers stay upright. They win us over by their sheer thereness. It verges on insolence: whatever's befallen them, they're still there. Constructed daringly from sometimes discarded and difficult materials yet resisting bricolage, they demand attention as intimate as any celebrity.
There is a roughness to passages in Cuellar's otherwise smooth and skilful paintwork as there is elegance within Amanda Benson's awkward structures. Benson builds to a final confident statement of defiance while Cuellar de-stabilises the initial allure. We are reminded that even Brigitte Bardot has aged (in more ways than one and in some ways more gracefully than others) and Tintern's ruin inspired Romantic poetry.
Real and imagined women, actual volumes and remembered physical spaces. Bodies and structures that offer us some degree of visual pleasure; scopophilia still isn't exactly a crime. Though maybe we stand on a threshold, unsure whether to succumb or to resist... Though these are not opposites, the difference is merely the position we take in front of them. What is inside the casket, whether gold or lead is, as always, imponderable. The decision is ours. Or so it appears.
MOROCCO O hell! What have we here?
A carrion death within whose empty eye
There is a written scroll. I’ll read the writing:
All that glisters is not gold—
Often have you heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Gilded tombs do worms infold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been enscrolled.
Fare you well, your suit is cold.
Cold indeed and labor lost!
Then, farewell, heat, and welcome, frost.
(Merchant of Venice, Act II, scene vii)