Carel Weight | Laetitia Yhap | Dave G Martin | Sarah Pickstone | Paul Gopal-Chowdhury | Leigh Curtis
I think we live between realities, in a kind of dream-space. The past, present and perhaps the future locked together in one image. This is the subject of my paintings.
- Paul Gopal-Chowdhury
Painting is a particularly haunted space. Each line is the result of a passing-over of the brush; each stain a manifestation within the canvas weave; each colour-space a conjuring from base oils and earthy particulates. Painting is an ancient means of transformation; making something from nothing. Each touch with the brush is an attempt to make an equivalent to perception, which, in being unable to truly achieve, instead produces something surrogate, something to be newly perceived. The new thing – the painting – is all that remains of a lost sensory encounter with the world. The world has by now shifted upon its axis, the light has dimmed, and the flower has dropped another dry petal. Pliny imagined the very first painting to be a tracing onto a wall of a lover’s profile by lamplight. Paintings have always been a record of someone that was once close but who is now absent – painter and subject both.
This exhibition of six paintings uses the medium’s relic-like qualities to speak of other, similarly ordinary hauntings. This is not an exhibition about the strangeness of confrontations from other times or other places, instead these paintings understand the ordinariness of such visitations. These are not the genius loci that occupy stone circles and holy wells, these are hauntings that occur in towns and cities, on farm lanes and on urban beaches. The sites of these returns are ordinary and everyday. This exhibition does not deny the otherworldly, it simply says ‘yes… of course we are haunted daily’. As Paul Gopal-Chowdhury implies, we do not need to seek out the overlapping of times and places, mortals and deities, we live in [and in]between these confluent realities.
