Gallery A: Cathy Wilkes
Opening Friday 14 May 14 – 7 pm to 9.30 pm – From 14 May to 16 July 2010
The research of Cathy Wilkes (Belfast 1966 – lives and works in Glasgow) is structured on an individual vocabulary mainly based on personal experiences. In the artist’s works each element adopts a strategic importance in the representation of experience.
Through painting, sculpture, installation and video, intimate and poetic tracks are designed, reconstructed, through long and reflexive process, having care of every little detail. Stories that let themselves be told and recalled through objects, emptied of their common sense and assembled so they don’t lose their distinguishing characteristics, the conscience of those who have owned them or the memory they contain.
Cathy Wilkes reveals a hermetic artistic event, supported by a narrative ability and a puzzling and at the same time fascinating conceptual strength. The approach to her universe isn’t always easy, as one often finds fragments of life and events which are difficult to decode; so the emotional factor becomes fundamental to enable a gradual intellectual perception. A destabilizing intent, never an end in itself, which results in environmental seductive compositions, modulated with elements derived from an intimate context, often inhabited by dumb but emblematic dummies. Inanimate human forms, as fleeting appearances that make the landscapes seem asphyxiated and emotionally recognizable.
For her second solo exhibition in the Raucci/Santamaria gallery, Cathy Wilkes realizes a spiritual dimension that requires an effort of attention, conceived by the artist as “a concentration without thoughts.” Following a specific and personal way of thinking through the perceptual emptying, a knowledge is developed so that past skills are set aside and the objects reveal their essence, almost coming back to a stage of pre-awareness, as well as for the babies.
A representation of reality in which even a number of small and delicate paintings, made of subtle geometric and chromatic connections, contribute to a characterizing and enigmatic atmosphere of suspension.