A Gauzy Flame

1st March - 15th April 2023
Herald St | 2 Herald St, London, E2 6JT

A Gauzy Flame, featuring new works by Yage Guo, Esteban Jefferson, Poppy Jones, Cole Lu, and Paula Siebra. United by a muted colour palette, the pieces on view tell stories of myths and monuments, flashes of beauty in domestic settings, and memories of heat. The exhibition, titled after a lyrical and sensory fragment by Sappho, will take place in the gallery’s East London premises and marks the Herald St debut for all included artists. Hailing from London, New York, rural Sussex, and northern Brazil, they question historic tenets of painting, offering fresh plays on traditional subjects and mediums. Blurry and burning, fleeting and timeless, the works in A Gauzy Flame radiate with a hazy, emotive power.

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Yage Guo’s paintings find inspiration in legends and literature. In her recent output, she depicts scenes steeped in melancholy from medieval tales of heraldry and novels such as Albert Camus’ L’étranger. Androgynous figures emerge in incandescent silhouettes cast against jet black grounds, seemingly lost in thought. Guo’s work is characterised by an ethereality, portraying visions which are at once softly blurred and sharply focused. Set within romantic backdrops of stained-glass windows and fields of forget-me-nots, her new paintings are imbued with an oneiric and palpable atmosphere. Guo inserts her own emotions into her work, charging them with ephemeral memories.

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Text written by Émilie Streiff

(Full text: http://www.heraldst.com/a-gauzy-flame)