Claire Kerr: She would lead us through glass
Solo show
gb agency, Paris
October 14 - November 10, 2023
Painting is a mirage that tells its name. The works here, now, make their appearance with the discretion of a whisper. They call to us with the insistence of a gaze that stares back at us from the shadows, and show us the delicacy of such stuff as they are made on, the sum of the countless, tiny, diverse, yet precise gestures that go into making them .
Claire Kerr’s paintings, prints and textiles do not exist in a room cut off from the world around us.
Harnessed by an invisible link, we arrive at the strangely familiar images she constructs, feeling our way along dark paths, reaching for an Ariadne’s thread that is as fine as it is solid. Before us, in the heart of a forest of signs, is a web woven by the most virtuoso of spiders.
Then, as in a labyrinth of mirrors, our gaze bounces back and forth as the images in the works echo one another. The painted gaze that stares back at us, as real as the drawing of an object fixed by a silver emulsion, seems to reflect our own without belonging to us.
And just as a stone grazes and marks the skin of water by ricochets, or causes the surface to tremble with concentric waves as it continues its course towards the inert depths of the watery body, the works that stem from the same idea, from the same gesture of the hand, spread out and sketch out their own route.
Fragment of exhibition text by Ana Mendoza Aldana
Supported by Cultúr Éireann, Culture Ireland, Promoting Irish Arts Worldwide