Stephen Thorpe: Boundaries of the Soul

About

Thorpe’s exhibition, Boundaries of the Soul, will feature a new body of work that further explores the boundaries of physical and psychological spaces through Western and non-Western symbolism, patterns and cultural iconography. ​​The exhibition will be on view from March 4 to April 14, 2022, at the gallery’s New York location.

For over a decade, Thorpe has developed a practice that has explored the pictorial possibilities of imagined interior space on a two-dimensional surface, citing artists of the early Northern Renaissance such as Jan Van Ike, Carlo Crivelli, and Robert Campin as artistic progenitors. Over the past few years, he has turned to the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychoanalysts Karen Horney and Carl Jung to more acutely explore his painterly process and the symbolic imagery and patterns that manifest in his work.

In 2020, following the self-isolation brought on by the global pandemic, Thorpe debuted a new series of ‘corner’ paintings that offer an intimate and deceptively simplified conceptual framework. The corners are the meeting place of three flat planes, compositionally rendered to frame the inside and outside of a room. Representing both consciousness and unconsciousness, simultaneous sites of safety and entrapment, the corners are a metaphor for the dualities inherent to human nature.

The show’s title “boundaries of the soul” references the interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness, the physical and spiritual – the very space that marks the critical point of awareness, here proffered through the paintings as an entry point to introspection. Thorpe refers to the psychoanalytical understandings of the soul as the “psyche” or the “unconscious,” and champions daydreaming vis-à-vis painting as a key mode of exploring one’s psychological confines.  

Physical boundaries are also significant in Thorpe’s painterly process and chosen subject matter. Lines are drawn and blurred through textures that are wet and dry, smooth and rough, controlled and chaotic. The edge of the canvas – depicting a room – bleeds into the gallery through thick layers of paint molded to the work’s frame – its own corner. Anachronistic objects question time and place, and ornate rugs, with designs drawn from a myriad of cultures, act as nostalgic calls to half-remembered sanctuaries, a tangle of real and self-constructed realities. Life-size arcades are personified yet switched off, inanimate objects; while the living birds of US naturalist and painter John James Audubon are the focus of lifeless, decorative wallpaper. 

Through these new works and an exhibition design conceived by the artist, Thorpe creates a setting that marks the boundaries of the soul, a platform for in-betweenness, and spaces through which to encounter the limits and distinctions between self and environment.