Dorothy Circus Gallery is proud to present Made In The Dark, the first solo exhibition of the French artist Amandine Urruty on British soil. The exhibition, which will open on Friday 26 March at 35 Connaught St. (London), will show an unpublished series of 10 drawings until 26 April 2020.
Made In The Dark is part of the 2020 exhibition programme of the Dorothy Circus Gallery Rome & London, “The Year of Love”. As an important meeting between the curatorial overture of the gallery and the deep symbolic research of Urruty, “The Year of Love” takes place for the occasion to celebrate the sentimental break from the past, which the French artist shows through the 10 great works through her corpus.
An ambivalent and bitter-sweet meaning is given to the value of these canvases. The use of black and white – characteristic of Urruty’s aesthetics – brings to the mind the ancient flavour of memory – like the vintage photographs – and whose intent is formalised precisely in that introspective and investigation able of reminding the viewer past memories of childhood and youth.
These works are not so much characterised by a dark soul but by a strong pop iconography, which is embodied through the joy of the characters and the several inhabitants of the particular Wunderkammer in each paintings. With an exceptional pictorial talent, Amandine Urruty is able to weave a story into a bigger story. Also in each work she sews a story full of objects and fun details, which we read from the perspective of how we were in the past: like children in front of a shelf in a shop full of toys.
From the carnivalesque attitude of First Fruits to the lascivious Venere of Venus, the artist clearly shows her stylistic references which show the influence by works of Magritte and of Pacome Thiellement, passing through Donkeyskin’s fairytale imagery, which brings the memory of the observer well back to the fairy tales of childhood and of their dreams, sometimes reassuring, sometimes disturbing. In particular, her works are a homage to the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, and yet – as journalist of Hi Fructose magazine, Mike Mariani points out – she’s able to surpass the master’s complexity of the “religious themes for pop culture imagery”, very important for the artist’s work.
A rich narrative as if to weave the plot of a single dream in a sleepy path that takes us back to games, to friends, to the days of which the reading inevitably remains dreamlike and faded, but undeniably seasoned with that veiled Pop spirit of nostalgia for what has now been and will no longer be. Amandine Urruty succeeds in making us experience that Saudade that the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi has defined as “something heartbreaking, but which can also soften, and does not appeal exclusively to the past but also to the future, because it expresses a desire that you would like to realised. And here, things get complicated because nostalgia for the future is a paradox.”
The conceptual and pop-surrealistic richness of Urruty therefore marries with the minutia and virtuosity of her technique, characterised by a wise and precise use of graphite that fills every single centimetre of the works. The latter’s materiality and impeccable pictorial rendering of a fantastic hyperrealism help to make the emotional memory with even greater impact, freeing us to close our eyes and allowing us to go back to wander in our still partially unexplored and secret night labyrinth.
