ABOUT
UPCOMING
EDITIONS
FROM 6 TO 9
Rita Chamberlain and
Robert Frederick Green
Sep 13th - Oct 19th
Rita Chamberlain is presenting three paintings: The Seduction of the Cockroach, Água Viva, and I Have Just Spat Out My Heart. The first two titles draw inspiration from Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. and Água Viva, while the latter references Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest. Chamberlain’s practice is deeply intertwined with literature, and she incorporates writing as an integral part of her process. Mirroring the stream-of-consciousness of Lispector and Nin, she does not pre-sketch but allows painting to unfold as a form of thinking. Her canvases are seductive, visceral, and corporeal. Like the tentacles of an água-viva (Portuguese for jellyfish), they reach outward, pulling us into a world at once microscopic and galactic. We might be seeing the insides of a body, blood, cells, fluids, light flickering like neurological synapses, and then veins turn into rivers, membranes stretch into landscapes, and skin rises into mountains. Chamberlain embraces the slippery boundaries between self and environment.
While preparing for this exhibition I returned to Água Viva in Portuguese and was struck by the final line: “O que te escrevo continua e eu estou enfeitiçada.” I would translate it as, “What I write to you carries on and I am under the spell.” The phrase resonated deeply, both with the gallery’s name and with the exhibition it contains right now: the sense of a dialogue between two artist friends that continues; the spellbinding, almost sacred quality painting has carried through the history of art; the way abstraction pulls us inward toward the subconscious. The official English translation renders it slightly differently: “What I’m writing to you goes on and I’m bewitched.” Either way, the line insists on continuation, on something extending beyond the body and the page, and that feels crucial here.
It is precisely this porousness, the body extending into the world, that leads us to Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body, a useful lens for reading this exhibition. Hildyard asks: what happens when we think of the body not only as an individual, physical entity, but as something planetary, an ecological being constantly entangled with the world around it?
From Chamberlain’s abstractions we move to Robert Frederick Green’s The Eurasian video and sculptural diptych Plate One and Plate Two. Green approaches his work through landscape and science, grounding his practice in geology, environmental mapping, and United Nations classifications of terrain. He traces the movement of water across landscapes: for Green, water is connective tissue, a shared artery through which communities, ecologies, and bodies coexist. His sculptural works, positioned at the center of the gallery and echoing Natural History Museum vitrines, appear like framed mountains or tectonic plaques, situating the natural world within systems of classification.
In The Eurasian, Green’s camera lingers on surfaces as if they were skin: pavement, grass, façades, water. Zooming into texture, the real world drifts into abstraction. Editing rhythms follow the movements of wind or the splash of water, folding human, artificial, and natural tempos together. If Chamberlain’s work plunges inward to the viscera of thought and sensation, Green’s moves outward to situate the body within geological and hydrological systems. One of his reference points, John Berger’s Once in Europa, tells of a French alpine village through multiple perspectives; likewise, Green’s work seeks to establish a unifying ground where scientific precision and emotional resonance can coexist.
Like the friction produced by the translation mentioned above, expectation rubbing against disappointment, the exhibition opens a space between naming and the unnamable. Here we might recall the poet João Paes: “Ventos podem ter nomes mas nunca corresponderam às geopoliticas” (“Winds may have names, but they will never correspond to geopolitics”). Where Chamberlain’s painting embraces the ineffable pull of abstraction, Green’s practice confronts the opposite impulse, classification, categorisation, even as both reveal the limits of containment.
Figurative Territory continually shifts scale, zooming in and out, from the intimate to the planetary. Chamberlain and Green invite us to consider not only the physical self, but also the second body we each carry: the ecological self, entangled with rivers, stones, sediment. How we locate ourselves in space, in history, in the skin we wear and the earth we walk is a dialogue that flows between the artists: What I write to you carries on and I am under the spell.
Jéssica Varrichio