Drawn from early photographic portraits of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these pencil works capture a moment just before everything changed. Men and women, posed with care, gaze outward, composed and searching, unknowingly poised on the threshold of a century that would bring war, influenza, and upheaval.
The title, Love Between the Atoms, suggests something intimate and unseen, the invisible forces that hold people, eras, and memory together. The drawings are delicate, almost ghostly. Each figure is rendered with precision, but without nostalgia. These are not sentimental reproductions, but studies in quiet tension, between past and future, presence and fragility.
There is clarity in the faces, but also a sense of vanishing. Pencil lines hold them in place lightly, as if aware that what they cannot see, and what we now cannot forget, hovers just outside the frame. What emerges is not simply likeness, but a fragile communion between artist, image, and history.
Love Between the Atoms is a meditation on how we remember those who had no idea what was coming, and on how their stillness, a century later, continues to hold us in its gaze.
Exhibited:
Frieze, Wilkinson Gallery, London 2016
