Group Exhibition

4 May 2023 –

‘We live in a radioactive and toxic time, which some call the ‘end times’. It is a time as apocalyptic as it is weirdly and wildly filled with promise. The key is never to succumb to fatality, always realise that options are open. As Shakespeare says – ‘Ripeness is All’. It is with this full embrace that we push ahead, refuse despair, hold fast to an optimal vibration – a vibration that is only possible when we stretch the bandwidth, tighten a flex so it thrums and soars with a dizzying grace. An optimal vibration is transcendence now, a miraculous connection, a bizarrely accurate bouncing ball that hits the spot from a weird angle. It is art that lights up a room, puts a spring in the step of tired feet, that scoops up sorrow and flings it over the moon. The optimal vibration can be loud, or gentle, easy on the eye, or leave one agog and aghast with a bellyful of laughter or a tickling titter. Matisse was right when he said that he made caring art for tired men and women to look at, once they’ve kicked off their shoes, and settled into a cozy couch with a comforting broth. Art need not hurt. Art can plunder canyons of joy. All can be illumined, even a bucket of shit by dazzling sunlight, as James Joyce reminds us. To dazzle, bedazzle, vibrate from the innards outward, is to adopt ‘a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation. Federico Garcia Lorca had a name for this optimal vibration – Duende… Something primitive yet modern, immemorial yet radically current. Not now now, but now!