Well-trodden tracks, reimagined routes and peripheral pathways map THE TAGLI's latest group exhibition 'New Geographies', presenting wide-ranging responses to actual and emotional landscapes. Considering how we at once navigate, interpret and construct our own surroundings, the assembled artists touch on psychogeographic examinations of self identity, the ever-changing topography of memory and architectural adaptations within public and private space.
Artists such as Thomas Cameron and Nassim L'Ghoul turn directly to their environment as a source for subject matter, offering timely reflections on the lived-experience of existing within a twenty-first century city. Cameron's solitary figures inhabit immediately recognisable urban settings, complete with contemporary street furniture, shop windows and service counters. Just as his paintings serve to expose the unexpected anonymity and loss of individual identity that comes from acclimatising into a metropolitan society, L'Ghoul's cast metal miniatures focus their attention on the debris and detritus that these collective consumers discard. The littered surfaces of certain German streets are rendered in hyper-real, almost religious, reliefs that elevate the overlooked, ground-level remnants of everyday life.
Similarly drawing from pre-existing, societal sources, Afonso Rocha presents a skewed, subverted exploration of those inter-personal relationships that play out in public. Figures are transplanted into an idealised, caricatured exterior of lush green lawns, bright blue skies and perfectly-plump white clouds - against which they perform scenes of imagined intimacy, as if inhabiting a testing ground for awkward experimentation. Such world-building, the act of inventing an exterior world that more accurately reflects one's interior concerns, ideas and identity, is also evidenced in the practices of Tom Woolner and Piers Alsop. Constructed by the layered piping of pigmented acrylic resin, Woolner's archeological panels present as part-painting, part-fresco, part-fossil. Pastoral, corporeal compositions rendered in a pastel palette appear intestinal as the fluid medium banished any and all hard-edged angles in favour of a landscape of soft corners and smooth curves. The characteristic warp and weft of Alsop's jute canvases, meanwhile, serve as the theatrical backdrop to staged sets that sit as if awaiting activation. Embracing abstraction, ambiguity and yet potent with potential, each sentimental vignette is imbued with the awareness of an imminent, implied narrative.
Elsewhere, works by Leon Scott-Engel and Toni de Jesus offer material responses to their immediate environs. The former's hand-made, curved canvases adhere to the pre-existing architecture of the space, and have been known to tuck themselves into or curve around corners, on occasion even slumping anthropomorphic onto the floor below. Scott-Engel's painted panels too appear acutely aware of their own medium, with his intimate, cropped compositions at once interrupting and embracing the wood grain. Toni de Jesus' terracotta and porcelain sculptures, however, act as if in opposition to their physicality. Vessels precariously held-up by spindly, supporting protrusions highlight both their inherent fragility and the more conceptual instability the artist feels working at the much-debated intersection between craft and fine art.
Finally, Lucas Dupuy and Harm Gerdes demonstrate abstraction's ability to interrogate and elucidate our relationship to space. Mark-making primarily with airbrushed acrylic, both artists present shapes and forms seemingly unconfined to the borders of any particular picture plane. Such implications of an unseen yet continued existence demonstrates an empathic observation of their surroundings and what it means to move into, out of and through an as-yet-unmapped terrain.
