dove passages", by Aleana Egan at Kerlin Gallery

Papier-mâché mixed with pigment, dyed fabrics, and molded shapes give form to "dove passages", Aleana Egan's new solo exhibition at Kerlin Gallery. The Irish artist conceives of painting as a continuous passage, an internal language that runs through her work indirectly and associatively, and in this exhibition, she focuses particularly on the compositional power of dreams—their ephemeral nature, the gaining and losing of a region of the canvas, close to the sensations of slipping and apprehension typical of a dream. At the center of the exhibition is "lit-clos", a floor sculpture that revisits the Breton format of a four-poster bed and continues a series of "sculptures for sleeping" that Egan has been developing since 2012—tactile assemblies made of pigmented surfaces and dyed fabrics that evoke physical and emotional memories. Next to it is "Bruno", a sculpture named in reference to the boy from Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves", a portrait of a childhood forced to mature too early—cinema, incidentally, is a recurring connective tissue in Egan's work, who photographs clothes, landscapes, and furniture from films as if underlining sentences in a book.