The project ‘Opacities’ is conceived and co-curated by four painters, Evangela Lines-Morison, Victoria Stolz, Madeleine Peters and Ann Debono, who will each respond to the following brief: to depict something they desire to see but is impossible for them to see.
The nature of an ‘impossible’ sight is left up to the artists to individually determine: it could be because the object or event is irretrievably lost to time, because there is no place a body could occupy to witness the desired sight, or because the object or vision does not and cannot ever exist.
The sovereign imaging form of our time is photography, but photography can only react to the real; it is a rear-view mirror on the extant. Painting is a minor satellite orbiting photography’s centrality, but it can compose images from beyond tangibility. Painting maintains a space of imaginative potential like an aura around the real. The buoyant optimism of this description of painting is countered by the fact that painting these visions transforms them into members of the visible, available to an eye or its proxy, the camera. This show presents a paradox at the heart of painting: the desire to transcend reality through painting partially neutralises the awe of the impossible, but does not seem to exhaust its unrealised promise.
Location
KINGS Artist-Run
69 Capel St, West Melbourne Melbourne, VIC 3003, Australia
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