welcoming Jack Kabangu & Manu García to our roster - Hamid Yaraghchi on exhibit

HAMID YARAGHCHI: LET THE WOUND LIE OPEN
Exhibition until 18 February 2023

Hamid Yaraghchi's debut solo exhibition at the gallery, Let the Wound Lie Open, is a staggeringly emotive and technically extraordinary body of paintings. The works are an investigation into the aesthetics of abject motifs that focus primarily on the human body as a symbol of beauty and revulsion.

Yaraghchi presents the human form as compromised, incomplete, and functionless, challenging and even tainting the traditions of figurative and scenic painting. Lurking somewhere between transcendence and ugliness, the works seem to beckon the viewer with their palpability and corporeality - both in subject matter and technical handling. For Yaraghchi, these paintings concern the "representation of the human body in tragical transience or incompleteness, in connection with the different spaces, especially nature and its elements." There is a kind of obsession with the circular passage of life, where one is reminded of mortality: from birth to death to decay and transcendence, in a similar manner to how the Old Masters favoured the memento mori. But Yaraghchi draws attention to ideas of the grotesque, which – in the day of NFTs, social media 'image perfection', and Photoshop – seem like scary, or at least forgotten, concepts. We are a society obsessed with youth, with the perfection of the image, and with that comes a suppression of imagery that contests that.

Yaraghchi's reality (or nightmare/dreamscape) is one where pleasure and ecstasy are levied or contrasted with pain, sadness, or tragedy. Leunig's poem (above) lyrically expresses these sentiments: to welcome life's various pains and pleasures. For Yaraghchi, it appears that these ideas are explored through the act of painting, the glory and decadence of his materiality akin to the sensuousness and corporeality of life itself.

JACK KABANGU

There is something of an instinctual, primal urgency to the works of Zambian-born JACK KABANGU (b. 1996). These hovering, face-like forms, demarcated with broad and frenetic mark-making and bright colours, seem to comment as much on African tribal masks of his youth (Kabangu moved to Copenhagen at the age of nine), as they seem to subvert the derogatory 'Jim Crow' caricature of the 19th century, or the latter era Golliwog stereotype: with the large red lips and twisted skeins of zig-zagging hair that stem from Kabangu's abstracted faces. But there is a kind of confident repositioning of Kabangu's reductive form – these nondescript orange eyes, these purple lips – as inherently empowering for the young artist.

A quick Google search reveals the artist himself standing amid his creations, and this figure seems a confident sentinel of African identity. It is like a signal, one where the viewer is responsible for (re)configuring its meaning, (as opposed to being told what to think), the responsibility to remove these referents from a prejudicial and pejorative historicity into a newly empowered arena, where a young black man can create a new, metaphoric, exciting, colourful mode of relaying the burdens of the past and the promise of a new future with a wry and empathetic sensibility, as well as the deft skill and confidence of a new young master.

We are thrilled to announce new work by Jack available soon, (contact the gallery to be placed on the advance list) and his debut with the gallery is scheduled the first quarter 2024.

MANU GARCÍA
"The beginning of the works is usually completely abstract..." Spanish artist MANU GARCÍA states, in conversation from his studio in Ovideo, Spain. "It is developed in sessions I try to keep as free and random as possible so that I can come up with things that surprise me."

Throughout, one sees how environment is inherent to his creation. Just like Philip Guston, who began painting the detritus and debris around his studio, we see banal elements that have been (carefully?) arranged within the painterly space: kettles, pencils, shoes, Crocs, bits of stitching or various bric-a-brac, or even what appear to be colour swatches tested right upon the canvas surface: items (that appear to be) of great familiarity to the artist, almost as a sort of codex for us to decipher in creating a greater mythology surrounding the work. And there is a delicious, visceral freneticism paired with the maturity and confidence to step away from a canvas to allow these visual cues space to breathe, to interact. For García, this could be akin to automatic writing: "the work [is conceived] as a game; not in a trivial way, but in the sense of playing with images and spaces [...] where primitive impulses and a fragmented aesthetic share a space."

We have exciting large and small scale work by Manu available immediately, and his debut solo exhibition gallery scheduled for September, 2023.