Knots of Transparency. Elena Magerramova

27 January – 19 February 2021

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Elena Magerramova works with paint and surface, but what she is really working with is distance. The image in her paintings is never fully present. It arrives filtered and slightly delayed, as though something stands between it and the viewer even when nothing visibly does. It is a deliberate and sustained proposition about how we look, and what looking costs. The paintings in this exhibition build fields of colour that resist easy reading. The colours are the event itself, unstable and in motion, marked by scars and abrasions and linear incursions that register as gestures caught mid-movement. The image behaves less like an object than like a trace of something that has already passed through. A knot is a place where transparency fails. Where something that ought to pass through instead catches and holds. Magerramova's paintings are full of such places. The surface is never neutral. It carries the evidence of everything that was done to it and never quite lets that go.

What is unusual in this body of work is how consistently the paintings refuse frontal consumption. They require time and a willingness to shift position and watch the image shift with you. To see them properly you have to move. You have to commit to a duration that most gallery visits do not ask of you. In this sense the gallery space itself becomes part of the work's logic, not a neutral container but an active condition of how the paintings are experienced. Magerramova understands, as Henri Maldiney did, that perception is not something the eye does to the world. It is something the world does to the body. That asymmetry is where her paintings live. Magerramova's practice has consistently engaged with questions of visibility and the person standing in front of it. That distance is social and historical as well, a gap that different bodies cross differently, that some traverse with ease and others do not. Her paintings enact it structurally, in the way colour reaches the eye, in the way the surface withholds as much as it reveals.

Knots of Transparency is an exhibition about what it means to see clearly, and how rarely that is as straightforward as it sounds.

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