Knife Edge

When we first started talking about putting Knife Edge together, we were in a pre-­pandemic world, a different place to the one we know now. The paintings that are in this exhibition were made in the space between that different world and the place we see and experience today. The paintings in this exhibition were made in a time of uncertainty –a world where the fragility of existence and Francis Bacon's reference to the "Brutality of Fact" seems more relevant than ever. It may feel that with everything that has happened and is happening, that painting has very little to add, particularly when we consider the number of images that flood our vision on a daily basis. Our response is that there is more need today for Painting then there has ever been.

In the period, when we could no longer go to galleries, museums, spaces, to see paintings, we became aware of the disappearance of the mirror that painting provides into our own lives. To travel to, and to look intently at a painting, is to visually awake the image. This is how a painting communicates and remains in constant dialogue. As to look at a painting is to actively engage with what you are looking at, for this reason painting cannot help but always exist in its ‘live’ moment and in the present. This is the case even if the painting was made 400 years ago. If we reverse this, where the point of seeing belongs to the painting, as if it were a two-­way mirror, then what does the painting see in this present moment? A distrust of truth, the perils of forgetting, the the face of our own vulnerability;; everything appears to be on a knife edge. The paintings in this exhibition might not always be reassuring, they are however an attempt to see clearly into the mirror and provide an authentic response to our lives and times.

The Artists