Ed Cross is delighted to present Haunt, a solo show of new and recent work by London-based artist Pippa El-Kadhi Brown.
From canvases just 10 centimetres square to diptychs more than 2 metres long, El-Kadhi Brown sets her tableaus in a series of ambiguous domestic spaces. Dreamy colours and blurry outlines trace androgynous figures as they move between rooms, bounded by walls and doors that become ever more impossible the longer they’re looked at.
Mirrors reflect things that aren’t where they’re supposed to be; elsewhere, scaled down compositions recur in others as paintings in their own right, a playfully self-aware game of tag. El-Kadhi Brown’s practice smudges the distinction between reality and artifice; the painting on the wall, and the wall in the painting. Which one are you standing in, and which are you looking at?
Anchored by cues of domesticity — lamplight and soft furnishing, traces of meals eaten and baths drawn — El-Kadhi Brown's spaces are at once comfortable, lived in, and unnerving: uncanny, in the original Freudian sense. At Ed Cross, the gallery itself is drawn into conversation with the work hanging in it — canvases on far walls invoke the sense of looking through a doorway into another room. Diptychs are hung to straddle corners, echoing the interior architecture of the works while confounding their physics.
Rendered in the artist’s characteristically translucent layers of paint, the shadowy characters populating Haunt are no more tangible than their environment. Simultaneously lumpen and ethereal, they evoke the sensation of walking through a dark house half asleep — of your limbs not quite behaving how you expect them to, or of something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye.
El-Kadhi Brown’s figures animate her spaces, sitting around her card tables and washing themselves in her showers, but they Haunt them too. Like mice in a dark kitchen or beetles beneath a rock, these ghosts seem like they might scurry for cover at any moment; as such, the viewer’s experience is more like glimpsing than gazing. That counterintuitive drawing-out of time afforded by the exhibition’s context, standing in front of something that feels snatched, adds to the intoxicating sense of discombobulation.
There’s a reason homes are such tenacious fixtures in our dream lives — the settings for some of our most intimate relationships, our earliest memories, and as such, our most irreparably crossed wires. With the gallery itself pulled into that oldest of orbits, conjuring domestic proximity in a setting that has traditionally stood apart from it, Haunt questions its own setting while subjecting the softest corners of our minds to the sharpness of spectacle.
El-Kadhi Brown’s are paintings of how things feel rather than how they look; like drinking too much wine or sleeping too long, the sensation of consuming them is pleasant and unsettling by turns. Just as its recurring canvases and characters conjure an intricate universe only to confound it, Haunt comes crashing in with all the incorrigible anti-logic of a dream. Using our most familiar settings as a springboard, the reverie of El-Kadhi Brown’s world lingers long after you open your eyes.
