[nggallery id=21]

Kit Poulson: After the Enlightenment

This exhibition of new works by Kit Poulson stems from a fascination with the idea of what happens in the aftermath of the vision. What is left when the revelation recedes and the consciousness remains firmly rooted in the mundane; how these experiences might then be accommodated into the world and our minds.

For Poulson, painting combines a complex history of ideas with an ever-present, cheap and immediate sense of re-invention, a site of radical possibility. His canvases and panels in oil and egg tempera on gesso have been built up over separate, periodic painting episodes that record a series of the artist’s returns and overlapping resolutions.

The paintings appear by turn to explode outwards, stack, layer and slump – some literally appearing to seep out puddles of painted matter. Any suggestion of representational relationships: to landscape, figure, interior or event, have become overloaded, almost invisible, under the weight of the paint itself. Glimpses of more delicate painterly techniques appear in fragments, layered under an increasingly expressive, abstracted and physical handling of the paint. Classical references and painting techniques crash into the physical presence of paint manipulated – appearing at times to have passed through some kind of hallucinatory wormhole in dimensional space and time.

Three audio works and book works present a series of short stories that explore the ideas behind the exhibition and comment obliquely on the accompanying paintings.

A limited edition artist’s book has been produced to accompany the exhibition and is available to buy from our box office for £3.50 along with a previous publication, The Ice Cream Empire, published by Bookworks and available for £8. For postal orders, please contact art@localhost.

Associated Events:
Screening/talk: Tues 10 Dec, 7pm, FREE

A circular discussion about everything (and nothing) with some favourite films, sounds and bits and pieces.

Rather than present a straightforward artists talk, Kit Poulson has chosen to invite two artists, Alex Baker and Ole Hagen, to join him in a free ranging playful conversation. There will be elements of performance, cosmic theorizing and… well all sorts of things.

Between them they will attempt to construct an event which presents the things that motivate them to make art and perhaps subvert some of the received wisdom about contemporary artists.

VENUE: EXETER PHOENIX GALLERY

Exhibition images Here

WEBSITE: AXISWEB.ORG/KITPOULSON