The Bridge II

About

East meets west as Cloud Cuckoo Land and Herrick Gallery open up a dialogue through an exchange of art exhibitions. Looking at the ways in which the bartering of information stimulates change and through this change comes an attachment of commonly placed notions and emblematic objects. Cloud Cuckoo Land now presents The Bridge II whilst Herrick Gallery presents Turkish Tulips.

Curated by Alice Herrick, The Bridge II features the Edinburgh based figurative painter, Ian Healy and the dynamic collaborative duo, KeelerTornero. 

Ian Healy explores the notion of being human. His isolated and somewhat uncanny figures often carry a sense of humour and a level of absurdity with them. Whilst having a keen engagement with historical and contemporary figurative painting Healy’s work often describes the foolishness and idiosyncrasies of life or acts performed. Painting allows for total invention, like the impossible body twist, or the cartoon eyes on a face. The expressive force of the medium and the play with presence and absence draws us into a drama or comedy, a scenario of the ‘everyman’. Working from random imagery the bockety technique of lines and blocks of paint tie the characters down to a post of momentary conviction displayed within a lengthier span of uncertainty whilst heightening a sense of tension and mischief.

KeelerTornero or Chin Keeler and Emma Tornero live and work in London. They work collaboratively, suspending their individual artistic vision and preconceived ideas in an animated dialogue of polar styles. Intuitively sourcing imagery or deliberating on a concept or theme they simultaneously work on a piece at the same time, creating artworks in which the impossible emerges as something perfectly natural. Characters play parts in an all-encompassing illusory world – a place of dreams, hallucinations and unkempt fantasy, inhabited by strange beings, beasts and insects living out their lives just beyond our peripheral vision.

During The Bridge, Alice Herrick set KeelerTornero the task of responding to Ian Healy’s artworks as part of their new project, KT-LAB: An Art Expedition with a series of small sculptures and oil paintings. It’s a 2-3-year adventure in which they complete tasks set by specially selected artists and creatives who then critique the work produced. The projects rationale is to challenge their currently held perspectives on the nature of painting and its inherent associations.