“Songbirds and Willows” invitations us to replicate on the passage of time, the fragility of reminiscence and our reference to nature, providing a meditation on the cyclical and ever-changing rhythms of life.
With a brand new sequence of work, the British artist questions up to date western society’s linear conception of time, inviting viewers to re-examine their recollections inside a round framework.
The primary two rooms of the gallery current a brand new sequence of works born from Almond’s visits to Lucian Freud’s west London studio. After he was invited to spend time within the house, Almond’s eye was caught by what remained of the revered artist’s follow, particularly, the left over paint- stained cotton rags that he used whereas portray. The invention led Almond to a profound exploration of sunshine and kind, reworking Freud’s rags into monumental landscapes. These photographs when printed after which over painted on giant canvases, render the emotional weight of presence and absence whereas touching upon the liminal house between life and demise. With their muted tones of earth and filth, with sudden flurries of color, Almond refers to those works as his, ‘Songbirds’ as they replicate an identical palette to that of indigenous British avian species.
The exhibition then continues with the Willow Works, the place the circularity of time is ever current. Seasons current themselves by means of watery veils of pigment that fill the canvases, every etched by the suspended branches of a willow tree. Buried inside, the zero emerges, a conceptual emblem of infinity, focus and the interconnectedness of all issues. Because the vanishing level of perspective or signifier of the infinite, the zero acts because the bookends of life.
Learn as a contemplation of mortality, the zero is the second when existence meets non- existence, a continuation in Almond’s long-standing curiosity within the philosophical questions of being and nothingness.
Within the remaining gallery of the Willows sequence, Almond applies treasured metals of gold, copper and palladium to the canvas to attract upon the dynamic qualities of mirrored mild. These gossamer foils concurrently evoke solar or moonlight reflecting throughout the floor of water and the altering of the seasons. Every panel depicts the willow in several phases of progress and rebirth, from the budding leaves of spring set in opposition to sunny gold to the naked branches of winter that creep over chilly palladium.
The properties of those metals permit mild to be attracted, mirrored and altered in a approach that mirrors the passage of realtime, evoking the fluidity and style of nature, whereas their geometric patterns recall conventional Japanese byōbu (folding screens).
This synthesis of Japanese inventive traditions and supplies present how Almond has not merely appropriated these influences, however quite makes use of them as a bodily and conceptual framework to to additional discover his curiosity within the nature of time, mild and notion in new methods. Simply consider Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Reward of Shadows (1933), which reveals how conventional Japanese aesthetics worth shadows and refined reflections over direct lighting. This idea relates on to the way in which Almond makes use of metallic surfaces to create refined, shifting results quite than static photographs.
at Alfonso Artiaco, Naples
till March 8, 2025
