Drawn from found photographic portraits of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these pencil works capture figures poised unknowingly on the threshold of immense historical change. Men and women gaze outward, composed and searching, their stillness shaped by a future they could not yet see. The title, Love Between the Atoms, suggests something intimate and unseen. The drawings are delicate, almost ghostlike. Each figure is rendered with precision, but lightly held, as though already beginning to fade. These are not nostalgic reproductions, but studies in 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 the strange persistence of these lives and gazes across time.
Exhibited:
Frieze, Wilkinson Gallery, London 2016
