Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Chen Zhe, Bianca Raffaella and Aida Tomescu

Returning to her primary language of photography, Chen Zhe's Eternal Ephemera series refutes the polarisation of such binaries as dreaming and awakening, birth and death, revealing in their place a hall of mirrors, projecting cycles of renewal towards eternity. For Chen, 'the photographs in this series are proof that we have always been living in each other’s finite times, and in the recursive time of the cosmos'. Ends serve as beginnings; in Ancestor (2020), a jellyfish, in a slow dissolving process somewhere between life and death, is abstracted, appearing as an eye, an erupting volcano, a cosmic nebula. This dissembling image is not coincidental to the theme of ephemerality but in fact derives from our awareness of it, as Chen explains through the verse of Ming poet Wang Shizhen, 'don't blame the pupil for indulging in fantasies and illusions, since we all depart from ephemera.'

Bianca Raffaella's ethereal floral and figurative paintings are also imbued with illusions and elusiveness, appearing to 'fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget', in the words of the poet John Keats, an inspiration to her recent work. Through blurs of white, pastels, and iridescent metallic strokes, Raffaella, who is partially sighted, translates her experience of 'persistent vision' – where images remain in constant motion, appearing only briefly as faint shadows or flickers of light. She describes how 'often the viewer will detect the echo of a figure that was once there.' Her resulting otherworldly gestures are further brought to life through impasto and hand-painting techniques, which, for Raffaella, verge on the sculptural.

Aida Tomescu's dyptich Into a carpet made of water I & II (2018) is notable for its clarity and light – the mood is serene and contemplative, not that this precludes the rich incidents and notations, buried in the under layers, the repeated painting-over (and scraping back), or the subtle unsuspected passages of transitions that unfold as we look. The work offers clear contrasts between an open ever-changing surface and the concentrated passages of silver-white built through layers of pigment and erasure, creating localised densities, lending depth and substance. The work's body is inherent to the way the image is constructed. It is formed from building the painting with scrapers and mixing pigments directly on the surface. Previous drier layers of paint begin to mix with fresher ones giving the work its 'found colour'. The temperature of the whites changes as we look, altered by the blue and yellow active underneath. The image with its feeling of private intimacy is becalmed and stilled; it produces appearances and gives off a certain state, a certain condition, which is like a spirit of place or an intuition. The title is a verse from an early poem by Thomas Bernhard: 'Into a carpet made of water'.