The paintings exhibited at the newly opened show at Pilar Corrias are decidedly sentient, the title of the exhibition itself referencing activation of the heart and enquiry into intimacy. We attended the private view on 27 April and asked the audience, what’s your hot take?
HOT TAKE 1: The first term is like, explosive.
HOT TAKE 2: Too aggressive.
HOT TAKE 3: I found it very emotive.
HOT TAKE 4: Every single work packs such a punch. It’s not shock value. It’s so emotional. It’s not about shock value, not at all. There’s an intensity to it and like the thing is the intensity comes before the *pow*. You see that it’s intense and then get the *pow* reaction from it. Like a cheap *pow* is a shock value, but with this you can see there’s so much emotion in it and that’s why it has shock value. There’s something more subtle there.
HOT TAKE 5: Abstract works always make you ask a question of why something is making you feel a certain way, whereas with figurative work you have something to hook onto. You can unpick within yourself why it is what it is because you can relate it to something you already understand, whereas with this, because it’s so abstract, there’s a story behind the artwork and if you dig a little bit deeper you can find out that story and it’s up to you how soon in that process you want to find out that story.
HOT TAKE 6: I prefer to see people in representations, I’m just a people person.
HOT TAKE 7: I don’t do “good” and “bad”. Also, before I can say anything about it I want to know the history of the artist and why they did it.
HOT TAKE 8: It makes me feel a very dense, intimate way. Because there is not one feeling, there are several. Like this one is the brightest of them all, it’s like a lightning struck. There is something very bright coming, and these are coming very close to something. It’s like half nature and half if you would do an operation on the body. These are the organs. It’s something really open. They are very intense but somehow also very sad, very melancholic. Like things are also falling. There’s a gravity – a weight.
HOT TAKE 9: These make me think about my grandmother. She had dementia. Her brain started to become so fluid, murky sometimes like this paint, yet remained so acutely intact. She could recall details from her childhood to the smallest detail, yet couldn’t tell me whether she had eaten lunch that day. Memory is a mysterious beast. A beautiful one.
Under the Skin and Heart of Drought is on view through 17 June
Pilar Corrias
2 Savile Row
London W1S 3PA
more information here
