Claire Price & Leon Pozniakow: Putin Dreams of the Rainforest

About

Here we are stood beside a pool. Above us the periphery and below us the interior. Neither can be entered. We are caught in the reflections.

Anything can be accessed across the globe, browsed easily through the screen. Our interior, invisible, is ever present, influencing every move we make.

In the construction of their paintings both artists solidify their intangible experiences. Pumping the pollutants of our prolific media into the vast solution of the unconscious. One must make sense not of the world but of one’s relation to it. In these works you are asked to gaze at the surface of the pool where what is above and below are reconciled.

Artist Bios:

Through swiping and clicking Price enters the global pool of information. She paints from the global news cycle, linksurfing through the tidal swell of information that is replaced anew each day. She returns adorned with the barbs and sticky pods of human happenings. They are other people’s joys and tragedies and we are almost aware of that -  but the distance is real. In this cacophony of immediate access, irony and corazón are Price’s defences of choice.

Pozniakow shows us himself and his lover, populating their intimate world with symbols gleaned from the outside: a tower, a bridge, banana palms, all drenched in luscious colour. It is unclear whether we are looking out or in, or both. It is not that Pozniakow is unaware of the cold facts of the world - not least how gay love and identity exist in distinct political realities. But he diligently constructs his characters a space where they can exist in parallel, a fragile paradise.

Pozniakow and Price studied together in London in 2012 - 2013. They have both been influenced by residencies abroad. Pozniakow spent three months painting and teaching in India in 2013. Price spent two months on the First Food Residency in southern Mexico in 2015, and now lives in Mexico City.