PV: Wednesday 29 April 6.30-8.30 pm
Join us for a cocktail and a curator led walk through at 6.30pm
Commuter time, the lights up, lights down, hour of day - a city stirring beneath the surface. Mundane lives and rituals glimpsed behind curtains. Familiar objects made unfamiliar through glass. The curious aspect of one’s own life when viewed glancingly from the outside. In Something else, somewhere else, in somebody else’s house Johnny Izatt-Lowry’s third solo exhibition at Cooke Latham the artist interrogates the act of looking, probing the porous division between private and public space.
Formally the works are dense with historical reference. The muted tones and flattened planes of the early Renaissance, of a Giotto fresco or a Cimabue altarpiece, can be traced in the curious palette and eerie stillness of Izatt-Lowry’s compositions. Likewise the tongue in cheek energy of Georges Braque’s cubist still lives can be mapped in his playful grouping of objects. This obsession with the foreword and postscript to an era of perspectival accomplishment establishes the quiet stage upon which Izatt-Lowry works. The paintings ask questions as to what was lost with the gain of mathematically rendered space.
In ‘A window’ the viewer surveys a human silhouette and still life through curtains. There is an act of voyeurism at play contingent with the way we digest composed vignettes of stranger’s homes via social media. Izatt-Lowry’s paintings acknowledge this digital proliferation and consumption and offer a visual antidote. Painstakingly made, infinitely dense in layered pigment, his paintings have a stillness and subtlety that requires a lacuna of viewing time; a pause in which to visually digest.
