Some Distance Apart' by Jonathan Wateridge at GRIMM

Photo: Divulgação
Figures forming and dissolving amidst a stormy sea open Jonathan Wateridge's third solo exhibition at GRIMM, his second at the London unit, accompanied by a new publication in the gallery's monograph series. In 'Some Distance Apart', the British artist merges the contemporary and the classical through figures suspended between escape and imprisonment, anticipation and resolution. In 'Diorama', intertwined bodies in a stormy sea landscape in red, white, and an almost Stygian black evoke the twists of fortune typical of classical tragedy; while in 'Signal', two figures in vermilion tones seem to beckon the viewer in a silent gesture, like a voiceless siren's call. In 'Siren', Wateridge revisits a still from Bernardo Bertolucci's film 'The Conformist' (1970) to portray Dominique Sanda's face cut by a line — an image that echoes the masked figure in 'Persona', another film in the exhibition. Throughout the series, painting functions as a way to mark the interval between memory and the present, in a constant play between the fusion and fracture of images.