text by Agata Polizzi
“ Les hommes n’ont plus le temps de rien connaître. Ils achètent des choses toutes faites chez les marchands. Mais comme il n’existe point de marchands d’amis, les hommes n’ont plus d’amis. Si tu veux un ami, apprivoise-moi !”. (“Le Petit Prince”, Antoine De Saint-Exupery)
Outside In is a collective exhibition by Sarah Faux, Keiran Brennan Hinton and Doron Langberg, representing a new generation of artists who tell of the multifarious contemporary, metropolitan society, while drawing their inspiration from nature as well as from human interactions. They are able to capture the spirit of the times. They belong to a generation of artists who do not confine themselves to reporting their inner world through a mere representation – painting in this case – but who instead become interpreters of a collective and broad perspective. Their formal research gives different results to each of them, but there’s a common emphasis on everyday real life, on experential circumstances and backgrounds, with a focus on human body by way of its carnal presence, like in the works by Faux and Langberg, or by way of its melancholic absence, like in the works by Brennan Hinton. They all let the world’s vital force flow through themselves both as an action and a restriction at the same time, in order to describe the moods, situations or interactions between real facts or imaginary elements. The private and public dimensions often lie at the heart of the artists’ research interests: two parallel spheres, two points of observations in which the observer and the observed individual end up intermingled, both looking for a reality that can accomodate them. In this respect, painting becomes a representation attempting to interpret the dialogue between the intimate and private spheres, depicting the view in which “the inside and the outside” blend like in a structure of communicating vessels where identities look for themselves, mix and change. Lives made of objects, habits, fears, places, feelings, traces of the past, footprints that help recreate a passage, traces that, paraphrasing the words of Brennan Hinton, are “physical structures that we build and use as our homes, internal walls that we raise in order to protect or safeguard our inner private self”. So, when you’re revealing yourself, you’re negotiating your own freedom, it’s like looking and being looked through a mirror; the representation becomes a neutral space where there’s no more need for meeting and confronting with the other. From the artistic point of view, everything is real, everything is crystalized, timeless, ever present. Space is also called upon to intervene in the relationship with time, thus allowing the arts to describe a non-physical, non-idealistic place, a place in full equilibrium where you can look without judging and listen without interrupting. In the works by Sarah Faux, Keiran Brennan Hinton and Doron Langberg, this equilibrium lies in a region that can be entered; it appears as tool that helps understand the contemporary world, the utmost human need to know and discover ourselves while preserving our intimacy, by protecting it from external attacks, thus demonstrating our vulnerability, even though we’re not able to stop experimenting the encounter with the other.