‘A Distant Glow’
Gill Button
12th of July - 16th of July - CAN Ibiza 2023
Soho Revue is proud to showcase a new collection of large and small scale paintings in which Gill uses the slippery and mysterious nature of water as the locus for exploring transition, change and the limbo between known past and unknowable future. Combining found imagery with an intangible and hazy style, Gills images sit somewhere between memory, reality and dream. With its warm, hazy palette, this collection displays a hopefulness of reconciliation with change and the unknown, and displays the beauty of and relief in its acceptance. On display is a collection of her faces, as well as several larger landscape and figurative pieces, all united by the warm tones of her palette.
The warm blue of inviting water is a prominent motif throughout this collection, providing a setting in which to situate figures as well as pointing to a long and global symbolic history. In each work, Gill returns to water as a universal symbol of sanctity and cleansing as well as the unknown. Her figures, submerged half in and half out of calm expanses of water, recall its significance in moments of change: our first existence in amniotic fluid of the womb; the sacred tradition of baptism through cleansing by water; the worship of rivers, such as the Ganges or Styx, as sacred carriages, marking the passage between Earth and the afterlife. As Roger Deakin noted in his book ‘Waterlog’: ‘...so swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking glass surface and enter a new world.’ Indeed, beneath the stillness and tranquility of Gill’s images, currents of change and possibility are foreshadowed. The figures in ‘The Distance Between’ for example, seem almost united yet the viewer is left wondering whether time will bring them closer or further apart.
Contrasting her landscapes are a selection of ‘faces.’ Gill insists that this coterie of close up heads are not portraits but rather arresting profiles of different emotional states, drawn from her personal experience whilst speaking universally to the viewer. Devoid of a specific setting, the images are timeless, their only context being the sensibility of the artist when she chose them.
Gill Button is a London based painter, known for her translation of found imagery into gestural and intimate portraits. Capturing moments of wonder, melancholy, strength or vulnerability, her practice encourages viewers to question how we connect to each other and to ourselves. Her larger canvases, often cinematic in nature, depict moments of contemplation which are evocative of distant dreams, fears or memories.
