Your Mind is Now an Ocean, Pilar Corrias, Savile Row, London
Wed 31 Jul 2024 to Sat 7 Sep 2024
2 Savile Row, W1S 3PA
Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-6pm
Pilar Corrias presents a group exhibition of works by Koo Jeong A, Ragna Bley, Keren Cytter, Sophie von Hellermann, Manuel Mathieu, Mary Ramsden, Rachel Rose, and Julião Sarmento.
Tapping into the history of the ocean as an image of the sublime and the unconscious, Your Mind is Now an Ocean brings together a range of artworks that evoke the ebb and flow of the tides, rivers, seas and beaches, offering a spectrum of seductive blues in which to lose oneself. At the heart of the exhibition is Keren Cytter’s short film Ocean (2014), a dreamlike arrangement of seemingly unconnected narratives. Cytter’s film begins with a modest family dinner that starts peacefully before descending into a furious squabble. We then meet a Hispanic couple, and a chorus of lovers on a beach rolling around beside a fire; as the film progresses the narrator seems to suggest that the ocean offers a kind of relief or alternative to everyday turmoil. The film concludes with a shot of the beach on a calm day, accompanied by the phrase, ‘your mind is now an ocean’.
Manuel Mathieu’s The Poetry in our Disappearance (2023) churns with rich blues and purples, evoking the flow of water withdrawing from a tide pool, while Sophie von Hellermann’s Out of the Blue (2022) depicts a bunch of bathers at the seaside in a state of what could be either delight or alarm. Mary Ramsden’s well up (2019) depicts what might be a seascape on the left side of the canvas, with sailboats quietly gliding through a moonlit night; marks on the right side, meanwhile, act as formal conceits that both balance the composition and confirm that the painting is palpably abstract. Koo Jeong A’s blue-ink drawings feature minimally rendered cliffs and rocky outcroppings; in one a solitary swimmer dives into an unseen body of water. Based on Koo’s experiences of swimming, the drawings suggest the sublimity of being alone in nature, suspended in water. Ragna Bley conjures a similar sensation of movement and suspension in her painting Drift (2023). Waves of translucent blue flow across the cotton surface, intermingling with sinuous washes of reds and yellows, creating a lush amalgamation of two contrasting energies. ‘If you don’t want to drown, be an ocean’, says Cytter’s narrator, implying that a loss of control or identity might be the only thing to save your life.
Based on Francisco Goya’s Naked woman with a mirror (c. 1794–97), Julião Sarmento’s Mujer desnuda con espejo (Miami Blue) (2020) depicts a naked girl holding a mirror, sat with her back turned to the viewer. Sarmento splashes the girl in pale blue pigment, which he juxtaposes with a sharp rectangle of turquoise. In Rachel Rose’s North Salem Moon (1993) (2022) a hazy full moon in a midnight blue sky hovers above the fluff of a dandelion. The 1993 date in the title indicates the date that Rose took the photograph – shot when she was just seven years old. Capturing the beautiful ephemerality of the moment, a midsummer night’s reverie preserved from the innocence of childhood, the photograph is also a reminder that the tides are controlled by the moon, a source of both lunacy and delight.
