John Copeland’s latest exhibition at Galería Hilario Galguera
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This is Not my Beautiful House is the title of John Copeland’s first solo show in Mexico at Galería Hilario Galguera and corresponds to a fragment of the Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime. The exhibition is composed of sixteen recent paintings, mostly of everyday or domestic elements and scenes, for example Put It All Out On The Table, 2022, a still life with flowers in reference to the traditional vanitas common in 17th century Flemish and Spanish painting, which represented through symbology the fragility of life as well as the inconsequentiality of the material and mundane.
This is Not my Beautiful House is an exhibition that features only paintings. In a world of reproduction, painting as a medium gains power with its ability to communicate with gestures that are impossible to replicate. This becomes the core of confronting a painting as an intellectual and emotional experience that is absolutely unique to each individual. John Copeland has the ability to create paintings composed of several narratives in which every section has a different optical perception; it can be read as a personal story but most importantly, because of the composition, colours and gestures, it can be understood universally. It is an investigation into the act of looking for both the artist and the viewer.
“At the heart of Copeland’s work is a keenly felt tension - the tension arrives at looking at the paint - seemingly still wet drips and gestural sweeps, thick fleshy impasto and amorphous forms, sometimes florid, elsewhere linear – and the content of the imagery itself.” Amie Corry. Balancing between abstract and figurative, John Copeland’s expressive, gestural, energetic and material style constantly maintains certain suggestions or formal meeting points with common reality. He reproduces scenes loaded with references of different origins – literature, music, poetry, popular culture, subcultures or found images. The distribution of the works in the 6 gallery spaces is part of the artistic intention, turning the gallery into a penetrable installation with paintings of situations and objects of daily life in a construction that was formerly a house, located inside rooms whose original use corresponds to the scenes in the paintings. Thus continues the mixture of times and spaces and the questioning of the empty identity of everything and the importance of context and circumstantial, based on the premise that no language is semantically complete and therefore it is impossible to name or represent the static, linear or solid truth.
This is Not my Beautiful House will open at 16h on May 12, 2022 and will remain open until July 8, 2022.
Courtesy Galería Hilario Galguera. Photography by José Rodríguez.