10 January – 16 February 2013
17 Kingsland Road, London E2 8AA
Open Wednesday – Saturday 11.00 – 18.00
A very Happy New Year to you all. My new year has begun with an encounter with the interesting paintings of recent RCA graduate, Sachin Kaeley who is showing a small group of painting in his first solo exhibition which opened last night at Seventeen Gallery on the Kingsland Road. Kaeley creates small-scale impasto paintings that allude to the idea of painting mediated through digital technologies. He begins by creating an impasto surface using acrylic gel which hardens to create a mould, from which he creates a plaster cast which he then mounts on board and spray paints in synthetic colours. His application of the spray paint is directional, at an angle, heightening the impasto. Whilst his work is clearly adopting the conventions of painting, their process of being made draws attention to the relationship between sculpture and painting. Most of his works look as if he has zoomed into the granular detail of a much larger painterly surface, whereas others feel like they have been made by layering abstract surfaces and textures in Photoshop. Some are slightly altered copies of each other, and others are shaped as if the works are dragged or manipulated in the way we move images around on an iPad. Kaeley chooses not to title the works but simply to refer to the media itself as a label, drawing attention to the materiality and process of the works in a way that revisits Modernism’s media-specific concerns, whilst disrupting this value by asserting the aesthetics of digital production. It’s a small show but well worth popping into.
(*N.B. The Contemporary Art Society is now open at 59 Central Street and downstairs we are showing USER GROUP DISCO (2009) by 2012 Turner Prize winner, Elizabeth Price which we purchased last year for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Upstairs we are displaying a group of works by artist, Stephen Nelson. Do visit when you can!)
Image: Sachin Kaeley, Acrylic and spray paint on board, Plaster and spray paint on board, 2013, 30 x 48cm installed. Courtesy the artist and Seventeen Gallery, London.