Artists

Bartosz Kowal, Ingrid Jacobsen

Press release

Thinking Out Loud considers making as a form of thinking: the fragile moment when an intuition, an idea, or a fleeting feeling leaves the mind and enters the world, where it can be encountered, altered, and understood. Bartosz Kowal and Ingrid Jacobsen begin with recognisable images and allow them to become something less certain. From this perspective, Thinking Out Loud can be read as an antidote to an image culture increasingly defined by speed, circulation and automated sense-making. A counterargument to wading through the muddied waters of vast digital archives, where images and ideas are continuously generated, recombined and returned to us, promising ever more immediate access to information and creativity. Against this frictionless abundance, the exhibition slows down the process of looking, disrupting the expectation of certainty and easy digestion of image and information. Kowal and Jacobsen remain with the slower, less efficient processes of making: hesitation, repetition, accident. Here we are taken through an encounter between intention and material, where the hand responds to what is already there and unexpected forms and moments begin to take shape. The material and the artist become active participants in a dialogue that is never entirely settled. Seeing and making become embodied processes rather than the translation of a thought that is already fully formed. The hand does not simply execute an intention; it discovers through contact with the material. A crack, a chemical reaction, a shift in colour or an alteration of form can redirect the work, becoming a manifestation of something previously unknown. Kowal's paintings slow down fleeting images and sensations, often withholding, cropping and focusing in on a moment which remains suspended between recognition and imagination. In Analysis Paralysis, two figures appear caught in an embrace while a hand at the edge of the image begins to disappear. Beneath them, sparklers mark a fleeting moment of transition. The figures seem held within a state they cannot quite leave, their fixed expressions contrasting with the vanishing hand and the brief combustion of the sparklers. The painting is bound, constrained, trapped- an image of a moment that is changing while also strangely unable to move forward. This tension runs through Kowals' wider practice. His figures inhabit moments of closeness, distraction and suspended attention, while the viewer is brought into intimate proximity with them. Through allowing ambiguity to become part of the experience of looking, his imagery resists the demand to resolve what is happening, Jacobsen similarly works by disturbing the conditions through which an image is produced. Transforming her studio into a darkroom, she allows analogue and chemical processes to interfere with photography, embracing cracks, fragments, reflections and unexpected effects. Jacobsen's La Fortune (After Sherrie Levine) I & II begins with a reference to a reference: Sherrie Levine's appropriation of Man Ray's La Fortune, a surrealist painting of a billiard table. Where Levine meticulously reproduced Man Ray's image as a challenge to the idea of originality and the myth of the singular artistic genius, Jacobsen takes the image further into abstraction, borrowing from the photographic processes associated with Man Ray while allowing the source to dissolve into colour, light and surface. The work becomes part of a longer cycle of looking and referencing, where images are repeatedly encountered, transformed and returned in new forms. In this movement between artists, Jacobsen also shifts the terms of the tradition she enters, moving away from the figure of the male author as originator towards a more fluid and collective understanding of how images are made and remade. By referencing the game of Biljard, she extends this interest in looking and observation through the game itself: reflections, glass, perspective and distortion turn the photographic image into a space where seeing is never entirely stable. Across the exhibition, the artists make room for what cannot be entirely planned. A gesture fades, a chemical reaction changes the image, a familiar image is transformed through another artist's eyes. These occurrences are not interruptions to the work but part of its thinking. Between intention and happenstance, Thinking Out Loud considers what becomes possible when making remains open to what is already there, and to what might emerge from it. 1. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), Eye and Mind, in Edie, J.M. (ed.) The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159–190.