JOE CHEETHAM | Something in the Way

ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY is pleased to present Joe Cheetham’s debut solo show with the gallery, Something in the Way. Featuring six large scale portraits, the exhibition expands upon the artist’s exploration of fluidity of feeling, gender and place in contemporary portraiture.

Starting with a distilled emotion in a cartoon sketch, Cheetham constructs each portrait in oil paint towards a balance of the real and the stylised. These works build on his practice developed during a residency with PLOP Residency last year, in the gallery’s former space on Hackney Road, which saw a shift away from spray painted cartoons and a return to the sleek nuances of oil paint. Layering a vibrant palette of digital colour with contemporary details, from fashion to hairstyles, he balances feeling with physicality.

The resulting installation is filled with six faces which greet and envelop the viewer in their group gaze. Through repetition of their stylised features – the enlarged and memeified side-eyes and pouting lips – the works maintain an ambiguity of gender, place and time which focuses on the cusp of feelings.

On the walls are six large scale portraits, tight crops of heads turned to meet your gaze against a burst of background colour. On first impression, they seem overly expressive. Their features enlarged and on the cusp of cartoonish, their lips, eyes and in some instances hands, creeping into the frame too, all settle between repetition and recognition. We encounter a family of features and a room full of feeling. But what that feeling is, is not fully clear. 

The works are Untitled, removing a layer of distraction from what’s before us. What comes to the fore instead is their ambiguity across gender, time and place. There is a fluidity and timelessness that balances with recognisability established by the repetition of close-up features. The first to catch your eye as you enter the gallery turns tanned cheek and almost memefied side eye towards you. Beneath strands of glossy, tousled hair, their olive green eyes nonchalantly meet yours. This painted moment captures confidence on the cusp between greeting and guard coming down.

What gives the clearest indication of feeling in these portraits is not their expressions but the colours they are set against. Removing any reference to landscape or location that could pull focus, Cheetham uses a vibrant palette to balance feeling and physicality. In this first work, a shock of red plays with bold blue with attractive confidence. Working clockwise around the room, burnt orange is warm and welcoming beneath pale skin, blond hair and lilac grey cloth. A soft yellow sits above an absorbing black and matches the mellow mood conveyed through a chin cupped in a hand. A concrete beige meets supple denim, playing with hard and soft similarly to pouting lips and furrowed brow. There is a blue you can’t dive into, lifted higher by the sweep of brighter green, a vest strap against shoulder, like a game of seduction that remains surface level. A forest green against lilac and plum stripes combines in a beautiful confusion. 

The visual language of these paintings feels raised from digital roots, a collage of references reconstructed that lend themselves well to being photographed and instagrammed. They are further faces, bright colours, sleek and fashionable. They are also paintings that capture varied moments of constructed contemporary feeling, a series of fleeting first impressions fixed in oil paint, allowing us to observe them in close detail between introversion and intimacy.

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ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY
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472 Hackney Road
London E2 9EQ
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