DIARIES OF A CLIMATE: Sarah Cunningham, Pam Evelyn, Francesca Mollett

Baert Gallery is pleased to present Diaries of a Climate, an exhibition curated by Louis Blanc-Francard. The show brings together the works of London-based artists – Sarah Cunningham, Pam Evelyn and Francesca Mollett.

The current pandemic has caused major disruptions to our daily lives in terms of human interactions and working conditions. In an attempt to safeguard public health, successive lockdowns and travel-bans have created a general sense of isolation for individuals living through these times. It is in this particular climate that Cunningham, Evelyn and Mollett created the large- scale abstract paintings included in the exhibition.

The title of the show, Diaries of a Climate, also refers to the painters’ common interest in the visual qualities of light, times of day, seasons and weather conditions. Abstracting from nature and their surroundings, the three artists developed painterly languages to reflect on human experience, desire and the sense of resilience found in the creative process.

In all three artists’ works, the materiality of paint takes center stage. Each with their own personality, they apply medium to canvas in search of an emotional response. Pools of color, drips and marks cover or reveal the canvas. Pigments in suspension echo nature’s play and transport the viewer to a world of grottos, lush landscapes and stormy skies where light irradiates before giving way to darkness.

Sarah Cunningham’s (b. 1993) paintings evoke collective memories of landscapes. Using an unconscious process, marks resembling botanical networks are painted intuitively and sceneries materialize slowly over time. The natural world she creates on the canvas becomes a gateway into the human psyche. Through a fragmented interplay of light, flora, sky and water, she gives form to mysterious spaces. These landscapes offer an opportunity to reflect on the inter-connectiveness of experiences.

Pam Evelyn (b. 1996) creates gestural paintings that embody her impulses. The energy she gathers from observing her surroundings is directed towards the canvas in an attempt to share the raw human experience. While her paintings are read as abstractions, they are informed by a sensitivity towards figurative and landscape structures. The process of adding and subtracting paint informs her next steps, with the artist responding to the marks and leaving room for surprise, undoing and construction marks.

Francesca Mollett (b. 1991) is interested in the idea of enchantment – a process of falling under a spell of magical influence – as a way of creating agency over events. Inspired by places in the natural world, she creates openings in shallow spaces where geological and meteorological landscapes act as catalysts to explore internal emotional states. Her fluid application of paint creates tense luminous surfaces with boundaries dissolving or resisting between forms.