Richeldis Fine Art and Encounter are delighted to present ‘Line Languages’ a dual exhibition of acclaimed international artists Alexi Tsioris (Athens, 1982) and Struan Teague (Edinburgh, 1991) opening on Wednesday 23rd of February.
Installation shot
At the core of the show is a reflection on the act of drawing as a central strategy for painting, a mutual sensibility for its rhythms and slippages, directness and vulnerability. Through experimental processes of making and formal invention both Tsioris and Teague place emphasis on the linear as a fundamental vernacular for their works. The directness of automatist mark making is for both a fertile ground for creative exploration. As such, line functions as a key foundational support within the architecture of their works. Echoing the an encounter with an archaeological site when first uncovered and brought to light, the potential of each artist’s marks, slowly and continually reveal themselves through a process of close observation.
Tsioris’s paintings, drawings and sculptures carve out an intriguing visual vocabulary bound up in the corporeal and the symbolic. The exhibition will combine a series of previously unseen paintings and drawings with important sculptural works created over the last five years. In Tsioris’s innovative material practice, repeated motifs and symbols merge and overlap to form complex and amorphous figures. These undulating bodies of lines are outpourings of imagination energetically drawn from Tsioris’ ‘private alphabet’. This rich visual archive moves between classical statuary, mythological tales and contemporary cartoons which forms the basis of each new work. Whereas his sculptural forms in plaster and bronze explore an instinctive material process of addition and subtraction, other formal concerns of surface and ground are key to both Tsioris’s paintings and drawings. In his ‘sgraffito’ paintings the canvas is primed and polished numerous times, building up multiple layers of paint before it is scratched into to reveal the base below. This painterly process marks an intriguing reversal of Tsioris’s prolific printmaking series in which the textured lines of a printing plate are built up on the paper in converging layers of ink. Through these varied material methods, Tsioris plays with the idea of production through erasure, as Dr Michael Semff comments, the paintings become ‘reductions that release matter’.
Installation shot
In his most recent series of paintings and drawings, the tempos and tides of Teague’s poetic compositions open up alternate spaces of investigation. Configured from quiet shapes of light and shadow, accumulated marks and remembered places the artist’s restrained compositions dance between the miniature and monumental. ‘Line Languages’ marks Teague’s first significant exhibition in the UK for three years. Often working with combinations of graphite pencils, conté pastels and oil pigment sticks the artist builds upon accidental marks such as stains and folds found in the canvasses’ material as a starting point for his abstract compositions. Often the Teague works from old photographs and drawings, the memory of which feed into his painting’s suggestions. A branches’ shadow against a pool, a shard of light on a sun dappled wall. Teague transposes the peripheral and the overlooked into a contemplative space. The artist composes from nuanced gatherings of marks and open spaces allowing a series of offbeat patterns to ebb and flow.
‘Line Languages’ runs until 7th of March at Copeland Gallery in Peckham.