Four-Folds
Salvatore Pione
Elena Rivera-Montanes
Cheri Smith
Haoyan Zhang
Curated by Jinyao Wang
16th Feb. – 16th Mar. 2024
PV 15th Feb. 18:00 – 20:00
Haoyan Zhang, Umbrageous Box – Where do I come from(greenman), 2023,
70 x 50cm, Oil on canvas
Lychee One is delightful to present a group exhibition Four-Folds, featuring four emerging artists Salvatore Pione, Elena Rivera-Montanes, Cheri Smith, Haoyan Zhang, each offering a unique perspective on the complexities of human experience. Through a tapestry of mediums and themes, “Four-Folds” engages visitors in a realm where imagination knows no bounds and nostalgia takes on a strange and captivating allure.
— Jinyao Wang
If cognition, and in turn representation, put things in place, then imagination sets things in motion in a form of free play. Part of this free play is the number of folds that might be figured in relationship to imagination. Four artists, four folds, all in this free play. In this passage the figure of William Blake comes to mind and his notion of the ‘four-fold’ which can be understood as imagination mediating the relationship between immeasurability and the sacred realm. As if starting to establish a chain, next comes Foucault’s idea of the four folds of subjectification[1] and this is completed by four theorists of imagination[2]. My leap into a relationship to the work is now complete, forming a springboard or curvature of becoming.
I suppose that an idea for an exhibition starts with an impulse, if only an impulse to show something in a state of emergence and this is followed by the timing that is made actual. Slowly elements are woven together in this process. Warp and weft, absence and presence, actual and virtual. Then there are elements that reside in the air itself, like floating intuitions becoming figures or relations of thought. Re-enchantment, fantasy, uncanny, bodies, presentation, freedom, nature, poetics, being foremost, but anyway, a quite different set of textures to politics, technology, power, media, identity, and representation. Polarity it seems is the air that we are currently breathing. By way of a detour, Aristotle viewed the image not only as a bridge between inner and outer but as a way of connecting the mirror in the mind with the window of the world. It is the image which serves not only to create a link between cognition and sensation, but also inner and outer worlds and it is this sense of entanglement of worlds that the impulse of presentation[3] of this works discover their (wild) relation in ways that occasion ‘strange nostalgia’. So, to create an exhibition is an interruption of sense, a reconfiguration of faculties in conjunction to material interfaces, a series of spacings, and an eruption of possibilities.
Salvatore Pione, Wolves, 2023,
dimension variable, steel, potassium sulphide, foam, jesmonite, sand
Salvatore Pione works a complex number of narratives derived from traditional craft and ancient materials that draw upon childhood experience. These elements are drawn from the sensations of life in Sicily and can draw upon grotesque theatricality which infiltrates into everyday life. This serves as the basis for micro-narratives through which the sculptural and performative dimensions of the works are joined together into reveries[4] of the elsewhere that lead into the uncanny.
Elena Rivera-Montanes, The Last Time I Was Home, 2024,
90cm x 75cm, Oil on canvas
With the art of Elena Rivera-Montanes themes of lost time, liminal spaces, fragmentary passages, and memory infiltrate the presentation of the image. Moods are in circulation, not unlike scents, and with this the air appears thickened. A whole number of objects appear to contest attention that included the in-between of the invisible which is animated by the force of the imagination.
Cheri Smith, Crocodiling , 2024,
12.5 x 17.5cm, oil and egg tempera on cradled pane
Cheri Smith’s paintings serve to cross relate references to art historical references such as Pisanello, Bosch, Carrington, with genres of landscape, still life and portrait all mixed into hybrid passages, which are in turn animated by figures of thought such strangeness, animality, wildness, and unknowability. A case then of a mixture of four elements: identity, art history, concepts, and genres. Yet something is missing from this, a sense of touch, nuance, improvisation, invention, and it is within these indirect elements, that an art emerges as a series of complex and strange entanglements that open the body to the void.
Creating in a multiplicity of forms and mediums, Haoyan Zhang draws upon reference to the different worlds of popular culture, mass media and information portals through which created characters can both enter and exit. The various configurations that are formed, present worlds at the intersection of the actual and the virtual which enable these characters to roam across different realms of becoming other.
Text by Jonathan Miles
[1] See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Bloomsbury, 2016) “Subjectification is created by folding. Only, then there are four foldings…” These folds are the body, the relationship of forces becoming a relationship to oneself, the third is to knowledge and truth and the last is to the outside itself. P.86
[2] Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Bachelard each advanced important theories of the imagination.
[3] Presentation is like a drama of becoming whereas representation is based upon a fixed identity and a recollection of being. Presentation relates to the faculty of the imagination and the possibility of the free accord of the subject. Kant performs a central role in the modern period to the question of presentation (darstellung).
[4] See Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, (Beacon Press 1971)
About The Artist
Salvatore Pione (b.1995, Italy) is a multidisciplinary artist creating works that contend with themes of grotesque theatricality, camp and remembrance.He strongly influenced by the customs and traditions of Sicily, and often the places and experiences of his childhood serve as inspiration for the realisation of his works. Colour, sound, plus the dialect and mythology that are integral to Sicilian heritage are essential elements for the research that he try to preserve and protect through works. Yet, a queer narrative pulsates through the stories and symbols, whereby the rampant machismo inflected within the strong Catholic culture of Italy its thwarted and disrupted by the depiction of hyper-masculine figures engaging in homoerotic scenes, with feminised features in his work. This is a personal procedure that stages a dialogue between elements of the past and the present which become intertwined with a grotesque theatricality, grappling with the history of tradition, and the possibility of body as an insurgent to it.
Salvatore often influenced by the writings of Giovanni Verga and Pirandello, where memory appears to be a significant process as a way of structuring the world. He attempts to make work as part of a process of self-re-discovery; it is an attempt to collect the pieces of a past that has traces in the present in the contemporary landscape of an accelerating world. Loss within the work provokes a tragedy, yet the hilarity of campness encourages humour and vitality.
His art-making processes are often influenced by his past education and work within animation and drawing, whereby motion and character-design are utilised to create captivating compositions and silhouettes.
Select exhibitions: Animalia, ArcPadstow, Cornwall, UK (2024); Dentro , Somers Gallery, London, UK (2023); Homodeus , Fondazione San Fedele, Milan, IT(2023); Fantasmagorie, Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome, IT (2023); Cancer Season, Saint George Street Gallery, London, UK (2023); Forgetmenots , Split Gallery, London, UK (2023); On the flip side, Guts Gallery, London, UK (2023); Hemispheres, AliceBlack Gallery, London, UK (2023);
Elena Rivera-Montanes(b.1998, Frimley) is a British painter based in London. She received her BA (Honours) in Fine Art: Painting from Wimbledon College of Arts and was awarded the Prunella Clough Residency Prize upon graduating. Rivera-Montanes has exhibited in multiple group shows, most recently The Painted Room at GRIMM, Amsterdam, curated by Caroline Walker.
Primarily exploring themes of time, loss, and observations of life, Rivera-Montanes depicts interior and domestic spaces that are often familiar to her. Constructed through a nostalgic colour palette, she stitches together memories, overlooked moments and personal history to tell stories. Although many of the paintings are devoid of figures, the work in fact conveys friends and family who inhabited these spaces, remembered through belongings, objects and their sentimental value.
Evoking a familiarity most can respond to, the work floats between the past and present. With reference to photographs she has taken herself, or found in her family album, Rivera-Montanes collages these liminal spaces to form fragmented moments in time, which explore the ambivalence between the places and people she can remember and what has been forgotten. Through the process of painting these moments, she aims to mirror how we recall, blur and rewrite our memories.
Select exhibitions: The Painted Room, GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam, (2023) ; Colour, Texture, Substance, No Name , Warbling, London (2023); Only When This Cigarette Is Ended , Pictorum Gallery, London (2023); The Angel in the House, Studio West Gallery, London (2023); International Women’s Day, Art on a Postcard, Fitzrovia Gallery, London AWARDS/RESIDENCIES (2023); The Prunella Clough Residency Prize 2020, UAL, Wimbledon College of Arts (2021)
Cheri Smith (b. 1991) lives and works in London. She completed her postgraduate in drawing at the Royal Drawing School (2018) and her BA in Fine Art from Norwich University of the Arts (2013). Her work has been exhibited internationally including with James Freeman Gallery (London), Fortnight Institute (New York) and Tabula Rasa (China), and her debut solo show Swallowing Figments will open at Fortnight Institute in March 2024.
Cheri’s works explore themes such as truth, fiction, animality and the weird. Her painted world is alive with animals, humans, plants and the elements, and imbued with an atmosphere of particularity and strangeness. Each scene is cultivated through a detailed observation of nature, and an imaginative transcribing of narrative elements mined from lived experience, dreams, literature and art history.
Select exhibitions: Here be Dragons, James Freeman Gallery, London (2023); The Consolation of Clinamen, Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing (2023); It is Better to be Cats than be Loved, Tabula Rasa Gallery, London (2022); Bookworks, James Freeman Gallery (2022); The Amber Room, Reference Point library (2022); Charta , Fortnight Institute, online salon (2022)
Haoyan Zhang (b.1996, China). He graduated from University of Arts London in fine art. He works and lives in Shanghai nowadays. Haoyan Zhang’s creation involves multiple media such as painting, image and writing. Through the archaeology of multiple classic screen images in different periods around the world, he mixed the artist’s individual experience, popular culture and the social reality of globalization/de-globalization. By showing the integrity of the role, he restored the creative object to its social situation of the same period, so as to let the viewer visit the historical scene again, and linearly expand and repair the historical content and individual memory.
Select exhibitions: The lost fourth wall, , Chi K11 Art Space, Shanghai(2023); Mille Cortex, Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (2023); Global Citizens-Asia, The Shophouse, Hong Kong (2023); Fantasy, on edge of the earth, Gene Gallery, Shanghai (2022); 9th West Bund ArtFair, Gene Gallery, Shanghai (2022); A Marvellous Memory, Bund 18 Jiushi Art Gallery, Shanghai (2022)