PRESS RELEASE
Nigel Cooke, Cullinan Richards, Daria Dmytrenko, Kevin Francis Gray, Egle Jauncems, Victoria Morton, Lena Pomford, Tal Regev, Alissa Volchkova, Stanley Whitney
ENDGAME
curated by Kevin Francis Gray
Secci, Pietrasanta, 21 July - 03 September 2023
ENDGAME connects a wide-ranging group of works by ten international contemporary artists, curated by Kevin Francis Gray. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece of the same name, the exhibition of drawings, paintings, sculptures and mixed-media installations will line the walls of Secci gallery and advance across town to the Secci Warehouse in Pietrasanta during the summer of 2023.
The presentation title cites Beckett’s absurdist theatre, Endgame (Fin de partie, 1957). An easy reading on the surface, deep down the script delves through analogies and repetitions, into existential themes such as the urge to decrypt the significance of the human condition and its system of symbols and codes. The group show reenacts the structure and the language of the one-act play: set in a confined space, it stages a dialogue in which the dialectic seems stripped down to an exchange with an end unto itself. The audience persistently waits for something to happen, craving a meaningful purport to learn from, but as Beckett teaches us, there is nothing to explain, everything is said through the work.
The dialogue between the works is generous, punctuated by a semi-abstract lexicon of recurrent movements and marks. Intricate lines intertwine Nigel Cooke’s recent practice: “I try to capture this tangle of things in coded marks, developing them as I go until they talk to me in their own terms, in a kind of private language that makes some sense to me in ways I couldn’t explain. It starts to speak of what living feels like.” Lines break down into signs in Victoria Morton’s spatial and colour investigations, resulting in suspended internal structures that simultaneously bind and divide the pictorial plane through multi-layered and interlocking hues. Compositions of signs and the repetition of their shapes form recognisable motifs that, in the practice of Cullinan Richards and Alissa Volchkova, trespass the single work to invade the next one. In Cullinan Richards’ gestural paintings, the triangular pattern seizes the canvases, doubling and oscillating between the ghosts of figuration and a feminine abstraction. A series of soft lines and uneven shapes find their three-dimensional pattern in Volchkova’s vibrant vases, where patches of colours dictate the structure of the pieces.
“Space is in the colour” according to Stanley Whitney, whose wobbly blocks of high-key hues paint shapes within shapes, outlining abstract grids. “I wanted to paint everything, and with abstraction, you’re not painting anything in particular, so that seemed possible.” Whitney strives to find freedom by working within self-imposed limits, his restrictive sense of the structure is balanced by the possibilities of the tints. While for Whitney the grid functions as a framework, in Egle Jauncems’ paintings it becomes part of the pictorial support, a tool through which to confront the material possibilities of the medium, as well as the painted image itself. Strips of painted canvas are woven into a chessboard of intertwined lines, shape-shifting into perpetual appearance and disappearance. Beckett was a studious chess player. He treated the stage like the chessboard, which combines the free play of imagination with a rigid set of rules, and where characters are simultaneously free and unfree, capable of beauty yet doomed. Not by chance ”endgame” is the chess game’s final stage, when strategies shift from long-term planning to more concrete tactics in pursuit of a checkmate. It is a critical phase that requires understanding structures and the ability to deconstruct them, sharper calculation and precise manoeuvring.
The analogy of chess in Endgame not only underscores existential themes but also reinforces the deconstruction of the human figure. Beckett deliberately dismantles traditional notions of character, identity and physicality, challenging the audience's preconceived ideas about what a figure should represent. Similarly, Kevin Francis Gray breaks down figuration in recognisable symbols and body shapes, embodying the multiple, fractured facets of the mind in his sculptural drawings. In Tal Regev’s translucent and ethereal compositions, the process of deconstruction happens through the layering act. Biomorphic shapes, conjuring and eliding figurative interpretation, release glimmers of human profiles and talismanic snake-like forms. “I am interested in […] the image and its undoing, the mark and its erasure, the action and its trace." Daria Dmytrenko and Lena Pomford play with figuration in order to grasp and give form to the subconscious, the unknown and memories, through fluid human-like profiles, chimerical creatures, and mystical environments.
The exhibition identifies in the artworks the endgame of the artistic practice, where “the end is the beginning and yet you go on" (Samuel Beckett). The works capture intentions, ideas, perspectives and emotions in a tireless search for expression and meaning of the absurdity of life. This becomes explicable as a diagrammatic series of identifiable signs and symbols, monotonous gestures, and recurrent motifs.