Conscious Unconscious

About

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present Conscious Unconscious, an exhibition that brings together Katarina Caserman, Héloïse Chassepot, Saskia Colwell, Li Hei Di, Zoe McGuire and Alexis Soul-Gray, six artists whose paintings explore the articulation of desire through diverse methods and with a distinctive approach to meaning. Through their practices, each of these artists interrogates a range of connected themes, including fantasy, sexuality – in particular, the repression or suggestion thereof – and memory. Psychological compositions, whether highly abstracted or hinging on figuration, probe beyond the image in pursuit of an intuitive connection to organic matter, be it the natural world or the human body.

In her sensuous landscapes, Zoe McGuire creates a fantastical world, absorbed in both the internal and external. Curvilinear forms and sacred geometry are combined in compositions that meditate on a life force beyond that which we can see. Invested in both nature and mysticism – and the relationship between the two – McGuire’s symbolist paintings employ a jewel-like palette executed along a tonal scale.

Similarly Katarina Caserman’s paintings resist straightforward visualisation, eschewing objectivity and source material in favour of mediated imagery plucked from her own memories. Like McGuire, Caserman responds to the conceptual needs of a painting, putting aside colour and composition theory in favour of instinct. The sinewy contours of Caserman’s compositions may at first glimpse seem corporeal yet they grapple with such abstract concepts as thought, memory and time, giving form to the immaterial.

Caserman’s spontaneous process is echoed in Li Hei Di’s work, which explores repressed desire and her own sexual identity. The eroticism of Chinese literature, music and cinema is of crucial significance to Li’s work, which harnesses an Eastern attitude to sex and attraction. Exploring primal urges, her paintings capture seduction and flirtation in the fluid application of paint on canvas. Organic subject matter becomes abstract, submerged beneath painted veils or membranes.

In Héloïse Chassepot’s intuitive compositions abstracted hearts metamorphose across the canvas in waves of psychedelic colour. For Chassepot, the heart motif is significant for its triviality. Today, the symbol is conceptually inseparable with emojis and social media, used to indicate a ‘like’ but without any emotional commitment. As a cultural signifier it is devoid of any real meaning. Chassepot’s use of the visual language of girlhood – spirals and rainbow hues – reinforces the irony of the demonstrative status of the heart motif.

By contrast, Saskia Colwell’s tightly cropped, intimate paintings are executed in grayscale. In a new painting, she zooms in on a pair of crossed legs, rendered almost abstract by their compacted composition and soft-focus perspective. The unguarded intimacy of the image is sensual – Colwell invites a voyeuristic or even fetishistic reading of human desire. She invites the viewer to look beyond the naked image and to confront their own psyche.

The corruption of innocence is also a key theme in Alexis Soul-Gray’s new paintings. The artist tarnishes and defaces appropriated imagery of idealised family life in the twentieth century, torn from family manuals, photograph albums, fashion catalogues and advertising, underlining the fragility of childhood and the family unit. There is an overwhelming sense of longing in her colour- and tear-streaked art that at once speaks of violence and care.