CHROMATIC
ArtEco Gallery, London, is pleased to announce the group exhibition Chromatic. Running from 16th November to 20th December 2012, it features works by Hector Castells, Luna Jungeun Lee and Juliette Pearce, and explores different perspectives in an intense burst of colour and line. Whether through panoramic paintings, experimental photographic work or coloured mosaic fragments, each of these three artists explores the gallery space through their own unique viewpoints, providing a rich interplay of tone and texture.
For Spanish artist Hector Castells Matutano, the lightbox works which will be on display in Chromatic hark back to experimentations with diapositive (slide) film in the mid 1990s. Collecting and creating his own slides, Castells Matutano examines colour, abstraction, street images and the landscape. In doing so, he creates his own unique view of the world, whether through a slide carousel accompanied by live music and spoken word or through film and video. Castells Matutano combines footage of the world around him (from a street riot to sharks in an aquarium) with colour stripes to give it an abstract feel; in doing so, he seeks to make visible that which is hidden to the normal eye. "Taking a picture of the street isn't something I can really explain," says Castells Matutano. "It is more of a reflex act, an automatism, that leads me to put images together in this way."
The act of surveying and archiving is also present in the works of Korean artist Luna Jungeun Lee. Applying traditional Western printmaking techniques to traditional Korean aesthetics, she spends each morning searching for images on the Internet. This half-conscious morning condition has been likened to the automaton-like state of stream of consciousnesses. It allows her to "identify my position within the world and makes me reflect back to my delicate existence in the ephemeral dreams of everyday life," explains Lee. Seeking to question the equal value of images, objects, possession and the possibility of autonomy in the unseen virtual networking system of our globalised world, Lee attempts to free herself from prefixed notions and structures. "I want to create things that exist and traverse between the margins of two worlds," she continues. "Perceptible yet imperceptible to the eye: This is why I don't like to emphasise the heaviness of gravity in my work. It has led me to work with materials that are naturally transparent, erasable or easy to break." Working in collage, Lee constructs and deconstructs to erase and rebuild our images of the world around us.
The third artist in Chromatic, Juliette Pearce, creates paintings based on photographs of places she has visited. The French artist explains that "these are places designed for human use but with no human trace. I consider these empty spaces as sets that can be lit up to allow for various narratives to unfold." By painting such fleeting moments, the moments between the actions of people - before or after their presence - she captures urban and country spaces in a state of repose. Yet the knowledge that this stillness may be broken at any second fills us with a sense of anticipation. Playing with perspective, detail and the interplay between the real and the dream-like, Pearce enjoys probing the tension between two opposite extremes of realistic representation. "There is a sense of artificiality to my work," she muses. "An ambiguous light emanates from colours that are bright, acidic and highly saturated. The proposed point of view is voyeuristic. The irony is that the viewer gets to look into scenes that are devoid of human presence."
After the group show Geometry, curator Kristin Hjellegjerde has once more brought three artists together to explore a common theme. "When you have two artists you build a relationship between them, like a partnership, and their works intertwine in some way," she explains. "With three artists it is possible to create an exciting tension. The exciting thing about 'Chromatic' is how differently these three artists work and yet one still can find a thread that brings them all together".
