19March2024

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Pierre-Fouche-painting

Fouch�s work engages with portraiture, the languorous gaze, domestic photography, and how these intersect with desire.

The works in "These Waves" at WhatiftheWorld / Gallery take as their impetus the torrents of time and desire, a heightened awareness of mortality, and early modern experiments with optics and capturing the transience of light, weather and human consciousness: A lace portrait pieced together using a domestic sewing machine -of an octogenarian gay man sitting in the artist's favourite chair (Your young voice � a portrait of Ivan Katzen) contrasted with a series of voyeuristic and intimate pencil drawings of seemingly solitary young men in domestic surrounds (And the walls came tumbling down).

A �traditional� bobbin lace edging with the story of a sailor�s seduction and drowning encoded in the pattern (His foam-white arms go over and round me) is paired with an imaginary portrait of two Iranian youths, carefree and happy, as if their arrest and execution never occurred (Mahmoud Asgari & Ayaz Marhoni). Interspersed throughout the exhibition are pieces from a series of plein-air watercolour seascapes� each painted on a Sunday on a different Atlantic seaboard beach (Cyan Sundays) These �little watercolours� are inspired by Virginia Woolf�s third-person descriptions of a coastal scene in the interludes between the character-driven chapters of her most experimental novel, The Waves (1931). The Artist�s amateur status in many of the techniques employed, as well as the marginality of some of the techniques within contemporary art (watercolour seascapes, photorealistic pencil-drawings), is analogous to the works� ultimate status as originating from � and engaging with � the psyche of non-normative sexuality.

"These Waves" at the WhatiftheWorld / Gallery opens on 21 September and closes on 27 October 2012