Cavernes

McBride Contemporain is delighted to present Cavernes, a group show featuring emerging artists Elise Lafontaine, Evangelos Michelis, Rebecca Munce and Katerina Pansera. In this exhibition, each artist explores the thematic and formal implications of various cavern-like spaces, ranging from the private interior chamber, intimate and enclosed, to an opening or portal from one world to another, or from one idea to another, engaging in a process that can be read as both a retreat to shelter or a wandering in search of illumination.

Elise Lafontaine’s painting practice starts with and evolves from a process of lingering in places that have the theme of confinement in common. Archiving her investigations through photography and writing serves as an anchor and jumping off point for her paintings, that unfold in a unique aesthetic language, bringing together her interest in colour theory, with an anthropomorphic conception of architecture and cosmology.

Evangelos Michelis’ works reveal an intense but humorous fascination with the relationship between people and space, and the contrast between the inner world of emotions and the external reality of the everyday. In this series, he expresses this interest through skewed perspectives, a blend of cartoonish and realistic depiction, and a similar approach to colour, entangled in the dark depths of jungle plants vying for light.

Rebecca Munce’s drawings emerge from an ongoing fictive escapism into invented symbolic realms, wherein different fantasy genres and the quotidian psyche collide and reveal fresh possibilities. Like hieroglyphics scrawled on the walls of a hollowed space, her works are infused with the ongoing energy of storytelling, imagined within a beautifully engaging style that is both compelling and confusing.

Katerina Pansera’s practice centres around ideas of containment, presenting warm, blurry depictions that are comfortingly soothing yet suggestively barren. Her concern with the process of visual perception and the brain trickery it entails is made evident, employing a playful trickery within different visual conventions. Her chambers also suggest a consideration of the voyeuristic quality of looking, about how the painted thing variously resists representation, stares back, falls apart and revels in our seeking it.