Ekphrasis

To enter the exhibition Second Daughter III (a girl is a haunted house) is to step immediately into a crisis of visibility. This is not a collection of artworks to be merely viewed, but a calculated, unsettling disruption of the visual field itself — a catalogue of corporeal and symbolic manifestations. The show, which gathers 26 works across installation, sculpture, and painting, is less concerned with the aesthetics of the gaze and more with the structural problem of the body as a site of representation, sacrifice, and, ultimately, art.

Hulson’s use of interiors is reminiscent of postmodern Edward Hopper and René Magritte, or if Vilhelm Hammershøi had started painting his domestic spaces after spending the weekend screen-bingeing box sets of Andrei Tarkovsky films. Stereo — a profoundly and gently unsettling image, bathed in Hulson’s trademark luminosity of formulated greens, shows a blank oval mirror reflecting “nothing but its own being,” on the floor beneath it, an old rotary telephone, the handset disconnected from the base with the cord extended between them, a communicative disembodiment metaphor that reflects the unease of the painting itself.

Ila Pop (Ilaria Novelli) is an Italian multi-disciplinary artist who uses different media from oil painting to digital techniques to recreate her dollesque and disturbing personal universe — a cruel world inhabited by willowy and doe-eyed figures who exchange roles from victim to perpetrator in a constant play that depicts classical and modern art compositions, song lyrics and characters from underground literature and cinema.

Derek Ogbourne is a British visual artist whose oeuvre is multi-faceted and difficult to define. His periods of production span large organic paintings (early 1980s), interactive art installations (late 1980s), performance art (1990s), and video and filmic narrative explorations (2000s to the present), culminating in his museum installation The Museum of Optography (2007–2016). Known for works on physical life, vision, violence, death, landscape, beauty, and the sublime, his obsessive preoccupations result in deeply complex, emotionally engaging artworks.

In Untitled (Blueprint) (2021), against a dark-green background, a complementary pink balloon drapes over a face, the blue shoulders completing the form of a classical bust; in turn, drawn on the pink latex with black marker pen, eyes and mouth, although familiar, distance us from and disturb us with a dislocation of observation. Any type of mask is always surface, a provocation to see behind it, whatever its graphic signification — the clown face, the Noh omote, the Fang ritual mask. Hulson overlays the classic portrait with a latex cowl-cum-shroud, pointing us back towards pre-existence and forward to post-existence, from naivety to detumescence, a gravidity collapsed by gravity.

Michel Foucault — channelling Immanuel Kant — wrote that, "Criticism consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits". If that is so, then this book questions the regulations of text and image and surveys the extent of restrictions on our bodies — and its publication incorporates the immanence of crossing-over. In his informative introduction, Jack Sargeant states, "Each text pushes thought in new directions" and "These photographs emerge from, and seek to return to, a moment of timelessness in which the body is opened and recontextualized".