Gesture

Stanley Street Gallery, Curated by Michelle Chanique

Gestures often referring to nonverbal communication, are a felt experience. They can be intentional or unintentional, widely recognised or small and intimate. The exhibition Gesture, curated by Michelle Chanique brings together four artists to develop this conversation, thinking about non-verbal languages in surface, medium, and physical movement.

Chelsea Lehmann’s painting Pleasure Treatise is the starting point of the show. The entwined bodies converge narrative with loose brushstrokes, creating a surface of tangled abundance. With an apple in one palm and a harp in another the faceless figures caught in fervent embrace fill the canvas with baroque sensuality. The artist’s technical rigour blends traditional techniques of chiaroscuro with contemporary ab-straction, playing with notions of creation and censorship. 

The work of Tanya Linney push the painterly movement of Lehmann’s work even further. Linney strips back the idea of gesture to a raw extent, simplifying and expanding the brushstroke across the canvas. Exploring scale and colour, the effect is visceral, giving an immediate sense of vitality and wildness to the painted surface.

In contrast to the spirit of Linney’s work, Chris Casali’s breathtaking detail reminds us to take a moment and pause. Sitting within an environmental framework, each surface invites a personal encounter with the natural world. Casali’s intricate and careful abstraction considers what it means to connect and experience kinship with nature. 

The work of Ben King disrupts the conversation between the walls, pulling the audience back towards the idea of gesture as physical and performative. His ceramic sculptures are whimsical and nostalgic, drawing on childhood memory. The rough surfaces have a painterly quality, evoking the visceral interaction between the clay and the artist, exploring sensation and suggestion rather than realism.

Responding directly to the practices of the four artists, Chanique’s curation initiates a conversation around medium, surface and physical movement. In many ways, the three painters reveal the sensibility and tactility of a sculptor. On the other hand, the sculptor’s work is evocative of painterly gesture. This tension plays with our lens of perception, reminding us that it is important to view things in a different manner and live outside category. 

- Claire de Carteret