Chiaroscuro is a term used by artists and art historians for contrast or difference in visual properties between light and dark. For the purposes of this exhibition it can also simply mean works in black and white.
This exhibition includes painting, photography, sculpture and works on paper by Artereal and invited artists. The genre, style, size and media of these works is the choice of the artists, but the subject or theme of these works also has relevance to, the idea of chiaroscuro in a visual, intellectual, emotional, narrative or physical sense.
The fall of light creates muted shadows in the white-on-white painterly crucifixion image by MARIUS JASTKOWIAK. The play of inside – outside light, with the source of the image in soft focus photography, resonates in both a physical and spiritual sense.
The mystery of half-light is also invoked in the interplay of shadow and illumination in the grey scale night garden paintings of ANNA SABADINI.
ELEFTERIA VLAVIANOS acknowledges her personal heritage and universal histories in, ‘Moonlight’, as she weaves in paint a haunting nocturnal landscape from the calligraphic lines of text that are place names of sites that now no longer exist of past Armenian massacres.
The topical and emotional issue of environmental vulnerability underlies the understated, sublime reduced palette icescapes of GEORGINA READ.
Photographer JENNIE NAYTON captures the ever-changing perpetual motion and light and dark of the ocean in freeze-frame then with ingenious precision cutting and faceting, transforms a two-dimensional photograph into three-dimensional sculpture.
The contrapuntal rhythm of the bars and spaces of IVOR FABOK’s wall sculptures bring into play the black and blue notes of jazz for a form of ‘musique concrete’.
‘Do you see what I see?’ is the question implicit in the print portraits ‘Seeing between’ etched into the sheen of sleek stainless steel “by REBECCA BEARDMORE and ‘Shift’, the dual images in graphic black and white drawn onto stone in the lithographs of NOLA DIAMANTOPOULOS.
The dark humour of social comment underpins ‘Breeds’, a series of small black and white drawings by CLAUDE JONES. Her ‘dogs’, range across the social strata from working class to intellectual and snob.
The modern technology of the digital print is the chosen medium for JAMES McGRATH to pay homage to the era of the origin of the technique of chiaroscuro. And in particular to Andrea Pozzo an influential Italian painter
and architect of the Baroque era renowned for his work with perspective and illusion and for his most celebrated accomplishment in the decoration of the Church of St Ignatius in Rome.
