Hanging by a Thread

Le Cabinet Dentaire presents Hanging by a Thread, an exhibition of works by:

Edmundo Arigita

Gavin Lockheart

Alessandro Roma

“Hanging by a Thread; to be in a risky or unstable situation”

Hanging by a thread, the imminence of a breaking point. The potential of collapse is what gives a great painting it's energy. For the artist, it's the awareness of a moment in a work when you've overcome the fear of beginning but not yet become subdued in the resolution of the image. In this moment, you can build energy that remains in the painting, capturing the ephemeral and making it last forever. For the viewer, it is a feeling hard to explain; that one moment that sets the whole work off and creates a vibration that we cannot quantify.

What happens then, when you visually combine works by different artists, each with their own energy and their own moments? The hanging canvases of Edmundo Arigita, delicately propped up and draped against the walls like flags of romanticism, look over at the carefully constructed collages of Alessandro Roma.

“How do you stop from collapsing?” Arigita's paintings would ask.

“How do you keep from falling down?” reply Roma's works.

Across the room, a small pink and green oil painting by Gavin Lockheart looks on with intrigue. “Their feeling of instability is in their structure and their hanging” Lockheart's work thinks to itself. “My structure is safe” he shouts across the room to them.

“But your image is vibrating” replies Arigita's marooned palm tree, “I feel that your colours or your drawing might collapse within your work at any moment, I have to keep my eye on you to stay in your painting”.

And so the discussion bounces across the gallery, from one work to another, each sharing their energy with the next and knowing that it is only the idea of collapse that they fear, not collapse itself.