Purist Gallery presents the group exhibition I want another chance. with five artists based in London, including Gabriel Cautain, Charlie Henzi, Xingxin Hu, Hyunju Oh, and Lucas Taberna. The five practices explores recollection as a partial and involuntary event. In 1980, Roland Barthes looks at memory in the perspective of how photographs holds our attention: the studium, its cultural and informational content, and the punctum, an accidental detail that pricks the viewer without explanation. The punctum cannot be searched for; it finds you, the way a smell or a texture can return a whole month’s memory uninvited.
Hyunju Oh showcases maritime objects emerging from a sea of memories. Dockworker’s ropes, labels, and gloves all contained within the shipping crate. Rusted metal frame pulls down the view with its heaviness. Whilst neon lights lifts up the sight to be floating above the rippling glass. You can see traces of labour representing the logistics system, but just traces, underneath obscurations.
Gabriel Cautain shrouds the impression of a laundromat sign in London with frosted perspex and acetate prints, so clearly framed by the sharp aluminium but optically intangible. Then another laundromat from Paris, similarly blurred. They gradually become vessels of memory, where sensory and atmospheric traces trigger the return of past experiences.
Visually clear, mentally hazy, Xingxin Hu paints hyper-realistic crops of the female figure on tight canvases, compact as diaries — Inviting you to look into the eyes, the back, and carefully open up the subtle emotional terrains within.
Looking into the eyes, Lucas Taberna brings a paradox. An orderly array of sixteen Red lasers could sting your sight out of focus. They are hidden behind the thick acrylic engraving, still forceful, but you could always find a space in between the dots that is safe to stare.
Opposite to sharpness, Charlie Henzi prints soft imageries of shirts on satin, buttons shines through the gradients. Every edge extended to the brim, like actual folded shirts. Smooth and silky, enough to slip through to a memory about a moment of tranquility, or a time before the chaos.
None of this is a failure of resolution. It is closer to what memory does. In the exhibition, sharpness is withheld on purpose, holding artworks more like an address; ‘letters’ sent to someone who might not be present to receive them. Semi-public, and a partial proof of who inhabits there. In a similar vein, Barthes argued that all a photograph can prove is that its subject was once truly there, 46 years later, it is increasingly common to encounter imperceptible generations of fictitious ‘photographs’. Yet what remains unchanged is the way a stimuli can hook a memory, pulling back the long submerged to the surface.
