PAPER gallery - Into a Light

Saatchi Gallery, Prints & Originals Gallery
Collaboration between LLE and PAPER

Exhibition Dates: 28 September - 28 October 2018
Private View: Thursday 27 September 2018

Jo Berry / Lara Davies / Catrin Llwyd Evans / Ilona Kiss / James Moore / Ruby Tingle / Casper White / Lisa Wilkens

Into A Light is an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and collages by eight artists currently selected by the Manchester and Cardiff based galleries, PAPER and LLE in the Prints & Originals Gallery. The exhibition marks a shared ideology and aesthetic between the two spaces, highlighting the wealth of talent in the regions, whilst maintaining a cutting edge conceptual programme that remains rooted in traditional mediums.

The artists selected for Into A Light use the idea of fantasy but not in a fantastical way. Another world is presented: a place rooted in personal experience but with a heightened focus; a kind of rupture in reality. This focus can mutate the world and make us look upon it freshly, like in Catrin Llwyd Evans' work which is constructed from drawings from life, imagination and found images. These paintings come together and create another space, one that allows us to view, devoid of people, a landscape that is both imagined and real. Artist Jo Berry presents us with hazy-bright ambiguous snapshots, alluding to landscapes or sometimes potentially sinister environments, while Casper White shows us another side of the world through reflective abstracted faces in his nightclub paintings.

Ruby Tingle’s practice is primarily concerned with the reconstruction of familiar forms to present and document the extraordinary as authentic. Her collages are rooted in natural history and aim to present an alternate folklore where boundaries between human and animal are obscured. Ilona Kiss generates drawn images of familiarity through the shared experience of our collective memory. The work remains on the cusp of these two worlds, through the existence of a higher reality or deeper set of truths, which we are unknowingly brought closer to by means of the individual unconscious. Lisa Wilkens’ interest in images is connected to their political and historical context and function. The drawn image offers a platform to address present situations and developments and to imagine and discuss a possible future. James Moore, is heavily informed by the aesthetics of games, comics, sci-fi novels and, sometimes, by real places. The painted scenes are never unbelievable spaces – they always stay close to the real, on the border of fiction.

Installation Views @ Saatchi