Exhibition Information

Hayley Tompkins Speaker Bloom with space
2022 Acrylic on panel 120 x 80 cm
(Source = efremidis)

Arthur Laidlaw Adalbertstraße 9
2023 wool, hessian, and latex glue installed with cable, wire clamps, pulley, carabiner, and manual winch 170 x 130 cm (dimensions variable)
(Source = efremidis)

Arthur Laidlaw Adalbertstraße 9
2023 wool, hessian, and latex glue installed with cable, wire clamps, pulley, carabiner, and manual winch 170 x 130 cm (dimensions variable)
(Source = efremidis)

			"Why fascination? Seeing presupposes distance, decisiveness which separates, the power to stay out of contact and in contact avoid confusion … But what happens when what you see, although at a distance, seems to touch you with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch, when seeing is contact at a distance?"

In The Space of Literature, French philosopher Maurice Blanchot writes that the possibility of seeing is separation. Seeing is a register of distance. Fascination, he continues, is a kind of seeing that has got too close – a ‘gripping contact’ which paradoxically confuses and obscures its desired image.

For Arthur Laidlaw and Hayley Tompkins, the act of looking itself is a shared fascination. In their works, a desire to ‘really see something’ becomes entwined with desires for proximity and tactile immediacy. Looking is enacted through gestures of painting, tracing and dissecting, thick coatings of material and repeating details which can feel at once caring and obsessive, loving and smothering. The results are bright abstractions and scattered perspectives which hum with pictorial ambiguity. For these artists, after all, the goal of looking was never about securing an objective visual reality, rather an attempt to collapse the distance which separates artist from image.
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(Source = efremidis)