P A S S A G E S | 10th Anniversary Exhibition
14th September - 26th October 2024
Rua de São Bernardo, 15, Lisbon
Encounter is pleased to present Passages, opening on Saturday 14th September. The exhibition marks the gallery’s ten-year anniversary and will include works by twenty-one acclaimed international contemporary artists. Passages will initiate unexpected dialogues between diverse creative practices, including works produced by different generations, in varied media and from multiple cultural perspectives. Celebrating this pivotal milestone, the exhibition will reflect our history of sustained exchange with specific bodies of work whilst consistently engendering fresh conversations and introducing new creative voices. The exhibition will foreground subjects that have shaped Encounter over the past decade. The gallery has always been committed to supporting artists working with nuanced and experimental material practices. Key to this curatorial foundation is a belief in the transformative potential of works which resist traditional approaches to medium and subject matter. The pieces produced by artists included in Passages open up new ways of seeing, offering unique perspectives and alternate models for thought through their intrinsically hybrid identities.
Antony Cairns, Manoela Medeiros and Anderson Borba’s works all share a preoccupation with repurposing contemporary ephemera and in doing so, bringing renewed focus to everyday detritus and that which is often discarded. Magazine clippings from publications such as National Geographic are burnt, collaged and embedded in Borba’s work, whilst Medeiros excavates layers of plaster sourced from derelict buildings and construction sites. Cairns utilizes now-defunct IBM punch cards from the 1960s to create photographic assemblages, employing alternate printing methods as a means of experimental image construction. His dystopian, blurred visions of the metropolis at night often bleed into abstract shapes of light, disrupting the legibility of the original image and the object on which it is printed. Across the work of each of these artists, one can find a sensibility for transforming once-familiar found objects into fragmentary artefacts, made strange through their remaking. Each work brushes against archival content from our ever-changing world, generating productive frictions between past and present and elevating the disposable to the status of contemporary relic.
A return to archetypal forms is vital to the work of James Collins, Whitney McVeigh and Gerry Judah. Collins’ ‘Lithic Root’ slowly carves familiar abstract shapes; like a stream of water impressing itself onto the earth or spreading through an ancient floodplain, the painting deposits a rich sediment of references as we journey through its painterly landscape. In Gerry Judah's painting 'Ark/Angel', a scarred sculptural form - evoking the architectural remnants of an archaic monument or shrine - rises from the canvas's ashy ground. Judah ritually utilizes this compositional motif and in doing so, asks us to consider how form can function as a vessel of memory. Working intimately with ink on paper, Whitney McVeigh is guided by the medium’s fluidity to explore the ‘archaeology of memory’. In ‘Ecology I’ the artist sensitively conjures psychic forms and embodied landscapes, continually exploring the possibilities of history as a channel for our personal and collective memory.
A concern with masquerade and forms that carry multiple concurrent identities is present throughout Passages. A melting ceramic sculpture ‘Flagg’ by Caroline Achaintre resembles folding skin, an amorphous mask at once human and animal. Olivia Bax’s ‘Cocoon’ also possesses a shape-shifting tendency. Linear armatures and arteries, encased and moulded in painted paper pulp, playfully interrogate the object’s capacity for sculptural form and mechanical function. In Diogo Pimentao’s seemingly industrial sculptural drawings, paper and graphite are utilised as sites of resistance and yield, setting up a dialectic between strength and precarity, power and vulnerability, the handmade and the minimal. Each artist’s work shares an interest in the way an art object can function to alter perception, to bend the space around us.
Alexis Teplin and Biraaj Dodiya share an interest in painterly architectures and mappings. In Teplin’s ‘Half Moon’, a shaped canvas tests the edges of landscape and abstraction, like a mirage operating on the edge of focus. In Dodiya’s earthy works, ‘Breathing Slate (day and night)’, faceted surfaces generate new terrains shrouded in imagined shadows from fractured and adjoining topographies. Bearing at once traces of their making and unmaking, Dodiya’s paintings ask us the question, ‘is there a possibility of a private cartography in paint that invents non navigable terrains’? An imagined place, sometimes found in dreams, is sensitively rendered in Nicolas Feldmeyer’s graphite drawing ‘Morning Sun II’, in which an incisive beam of light opens up the possibility of space beyond our immediate grasp. Francisca Carvalho carefully bleeds natural dyes into her textile composition ‘The Sequel’, a visceral interweaving of offbeat patterns which evoke our bodies’ disjointed passages through landscape.
Working between documentary and fiction, Joao Braganca Gil’s, ‘Trouble in Paradise’, explores spillage from the military base of Lajes on Terceira (Azores). Throughout the series of atmospheric stills, potential cracks and fissures in our perception are unearthed through deconstruction of text, image and environment. Through careful image layering and refiguring of landscape, we are compelled to delve into a deeper socio-political context of the islands, to question the positions of observer and observed. Memories of place are also central in Kemar Keanu Wynter ‘Digest’ series of watercolours, which are each accompanied by a piece of poetic prose. These haptic recollections of specific sensory moments delve into the creative intersections between painting and cooking.
Several works in Passages reflect on how a repeated formal action or gesture can build accretions of material and conceptual weight. In Neha Vedpathak, Jakob Gasteiger and Charles Hadcock’s processes, a repeating tool of construction shapes and hones their chosen material, whether by comb, push-pin or casting mould. For Vedpathak, the process of plucking thick Japanese paper into intricate webs has the potential to infinitely repeat, a meditative and labour-intensive process with no clear beginning or end. For Gasteiger, a line of minimal and persistent mark-making has carried through from the 1980s to the present. In Hadcock's new 'Palindrome' series, repeated geometric forms interlock in a consistently evolving puzzle, an enduring interplay between forms both natural and the engineered.
Across the exhibition, there is a shared excitement for the possibilities by which linear gesture can be newly rendered. In the surging sculptural reliefs of Adam Ball, flowing jets of water carve the form of ‘Full of Time and Silence’ whilst fire chars its wooden edges. In this way, the artist extends his subversion of painterly gesture through the use of elemental forces. In Oliver Barratt’s bronze sculpture ‘Knot Thinking’, cast lines expand and contract, echoing like a strand of thought turning in the mind. Meanwhile, undulating bodies of line group and cluster to form heads in Alexi Tsioris’s monotypes. Energetically drawn from the artist’s ‘private alphabet’ these leaky containers transform into vestibules for spontaneous outpourings of imagination.
From its beginnings as a moving gallery in London in 2014 to its present space in Lisbon, Passages provides an opportunity to reflect on the gallery’s growth and path into the future.
The exhibition runs until 26th October.
Planning your Visit
Encounter, Rua de São Bernardo 15 R/C, 1200-823, Estrela, Lisboa
Wednesday - Saturday 12-7pm and by appointment