Overview
Belmacz’s summer 2023 exhibition, Wet Suction Spins Forever, can be seen as an entangled conversation; a fluid courting, where extra-humanly sensations become the substrate for an anomalous ecology. Cultivated by artist Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, in this exhibition a series of recent paintings by Morten Skrøder Lund are contextualised alongside changing, changeable ecosystems. Effusing one another, here abstracted gestures rub up with nature, dissolving and germinating, creating a restive tension within the space of the gallery.
Morten Skrøder Lund’s paintings are dense microcosms. Gestating since late 2022, the small square canvasses in this exhibition are brittle memories, re-visioned and re-visioned, in fleshy dabs of oil. Wholly unfixed, here matter vibrates upon and all over surfaces appearing slick, almost sticky; a sensual encounter suspended yet seeping. For Morten, abstraction—his main means of visioning the meticulous research at the centre of his practice—is a means through which he is able to shatter the hard surfaces of the didact world. In the works for this exhibition, abstraction is used as a process, one that suspends both time and narrative, in order to foreground the flows of muscular thinking. That is, a process through which to vision the unfixable tensions of humanly life.
Wet Suction Spins Forever, will be Morten’s third presentation with Belmacz. Here, hung high upon the gallery’s walls, the surfaces of these reverberating paintings become rousing constellations, and a context nurtured by Laura Ní Fhlaibhín in order to enliven her own dynamic ecosystems.
Composed from mobile ash-wood planters, filled with cucumber vines and vivacious greenery, Laura’s ecosystems are generous sites dedicated and designed to foreground the knowledge-bodies of Leopard Slugs. Throughout Wet Suction Spins Forever, Laura’s ecosystems will not just vision life, in its three-dimensional form, but house life as earthly structures hosting regular visits from a cornucopia of Leopard Slugs. (It is of note that Laura’s ecosystems and the activation of these through the slug visits has been developed in conversation with the senior curator of molluscs at Natural History Museum London.) Building upon her project Slug Love, that embraces the learning experiences afforded by the acrobatic mating rituals of Leopard slugs—experiences that Laura presents in this exhibition through an edible potato paper sex guide—the earthly environments established by Laura not only foregrounds the perspective of slugs but, alongside Morten’s paintings, provides a platform from which we are able to glimmer new possibilities for humanly life; those given when we embrace an erotics found in fluid ways of life.
