- Venue
- Canvas & Cream
- Starts
- Thursday, April 19, 2012
- Ends
- Saturday, June 2, 2012
- Address
- 18 London Road Forest Hill SE23 3HF
- Location
- London
Raf Zawistowski’s debut solo exhibition focuses on the relationship between materiality and his use of religious iconography. In the works presented, thick encaustic paint (a mixture of wax and oil paint) is applied heavily alongside day-glow fluorescent colours to create images that explore an area which Zawistowski refers to as existing between “the sublime and the anti-sublime”. By doing this, he sets up a dialogue between image and the materiality of paint in order to produce works which seem to exude what the Neo-Geo artist Peter Halley once referred to as “the after glow of low budget mysticism”. In this exhibition, Zawistowski has produced a new body of work comprising of twelve paintings. Choosing to make twelve paintings derived from the available imagery of the 265 Popes to have reigned to date, Zawistowski hints at the Apostolic connection they have with the Christian faith, and the succession of spiritual authority embodied by these religious figures. His paintings take as their starting point the familiar iconography of the Pope, which, whilst recognisable as this, suggest instead hollowed-out silhouettes or flattened ‘carvings’ of these Papal images.
