Camera Obscura

2024.11.02 - 2024.12.14

Artist: Albie Romero, Camilla Giannotti, Ollie White, Sonia Jia, Yan Bingqing

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Cub_ism_ Artspace is pleased to announce the new group exhibition Camera Obscura with artists Albie Romero, Camilla Giannotti, Ollie White, Sonia Jia and Yan Bingqing. "camera obscura" is essentially an optical instrument that projects images on a screen. Starting from the 15th century, Western artists used the camera obscura as an auxiliary tool for painting, and it was  used in perspective painting. The non-substantive phantom projected in the "camera obscura" mentioned in iconography is a metaphor for spiritual activities, and ideology as spiritual activities projects and inscribes itself into the material world of commodities. Through the exhibition, artists’ paintings seem to perfectly interpret the definition of "camera obscura" in different disciplines, and metaphorically expresses one's own spiritual world in their art works. 

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Artist Albie Romero's works inspired by the photography he took with digital and film camera. Stating with photography as composition, his recent works are based on a personal perspective, expressing his feelings about the inner world in the form of paintings, expressing emotions implicitly like meditation. Like the early images observed by "camera obscura", most of Albie's works are covered by distinctive blurriness with nostalgia of old photographs, guiding the viewer to establish a connection and left the paintings with an open ending. Camilla Giannotti uses her works to depict the soft memories within the past. When viewing those familiar objects with a nostalgic feeling, there is a subtle sense of uneasiness in the painting, and there are some contradictory emotions hidden within those sweet sugar-coated shells. 

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Chairs, hand-held mirrors, etcetera are common theme in Ollie White’s paintings. He regards painting as a tool that gives new meaning to the images presented in his works, transforming the depicted objects into anthropomorphic beings and thereby raising questions about meaning, authenticity and desire. Sonia Jia's works are more like poems derived from ordinary life and memories. The theme color of the picture is like the bruise marks on traumatised skin. The hazy picture and the characters hidden in it make the paintings become more narrative. As time goes by, Sonia's works also extend the paintings with monumentality under her comprehensive studies. Artist Yan Bingqing's creative environment and the way to approach media are not exactly the same as artists aforesaid. He uses his own imagination to outline dramatic pictures. His works, from the beginning part that making paint to putting it on the wooden board, all start from an instinct, recreating things that people are familiar with and cognised. In Yan’s paintings, he depicts a new look of classicism.

 

"Inversion is not only an image inversion between material life and spiritual images, it is also a characteristic of ideology itself, inverting values, sequences and real relationships." (W.J.T Mitchell, Iconology 218.) The existential meaning of paintings always adds an abstruse value to the audience in its guidance time and time again. When the real objects transformed from the perception to appear in front of people, the picture, texture of the work and the emotions depicted by the artist in the painting allow people to enter the Camera Obscura from the reality to explore the spiritual world.