IMPERMANENCE

Gill Button

1st - 31st of March 2023

Soho Revue is pleased to present ‘Impermanence’, an exhibition of works by Gill Button. Showcasing a new collection of large and small scale paintings, Gill uses the slippery and mysterious nature of  water as the locus for exploring  transition, change and the limbo between  known past and unknowable future. Combining found imagery, with the photographic quality of her almost monochrome palette, as well as the intangibility and haziness of her style, Gills images sit somewhere between memory, reality and dream. ‘Impermanence’ displays the possibility of reconciliation with change and the unknown, displaying the beauty of and relief in its acceptance. On display is a collection of her ‘faces’, as well as several larger landscape pieces, all united by the cool tranquility of her characteristically blue palette.

Water is a  prominent motif  throughout the works in ‘Impermanence’. It provides a setting in which to situate figures as well as a long and global symbolic history. In each work, Gill returns constantly to water as a universal symbol of sanctity and cleansing as well as the unknown. Her figures, submerged half in and half out of  calm expanses of water, recall its significance in moments of change:  our first existence in amniotic fluid of the womb; the sacred tradition of baptism through cleansing by water; the worship of rivers, such as the Ganges or Styx, as sacred carriages, marking the passage between Earth and the afterlife. As Roger Deakin noted in his book ‘Waterlog’: ‘...so swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking glass surface and enter a new world.’  Indeed, beneath the stillness and tranquility of Gill’s images, currents of change are foreshadowed. The figures in ‘The Distance Between’ for example, seem almost united yet the viewer is left wondering whether time will bring them closer or further apart.

Contrasting  her  landscapes are a selection of ‘faces.’ Gill insists that this coterie of close up heads are not portraits but rather arresting profiles of different emotional states, drawn from her personal experience yet speaking universally to the viewer.  Devoid of a specific setting, the images are timeless, their only context being the sensibility of the artist when she chose them.

There is a sense of aqueousness that even seems to penetrate Gill’s style, her thinned out oils, almost like watercolour or ink, which are brushed loosely over canvases, and which build on the romance hinted at by the title of each face or landscape. The faces, sometimes painted with extreme economy, are like dreams, ready to dissolve at any moment yet conjuring the potent feelings of  remembered moments or feelings.