Between Mediums: Alchemy, Instability, and the Architecture of Perception

By Lisa Knoll

19/12/2021

Exhibition Details:
Atticus Art Gallery, Bath | 17 November – 10 December 2021
CARC LAB/2021: Between Mediums

Atticus Art Gallery ONLINE

Image © Atticus Gallery

In its final and most conceptually daring instalment, CARC LAB/2021: The Alchemy of Media culminates in Between Mediums—a rich and hauntingly cohesive exhibition at Atticus Art Gallery in Bath. Bringing together five formidable talents—Isabelle Moreau, Kai Ueda, Javier Estévez, and Varvara Dmitrieva—this show elegantly dissolves the distinctions between painting, photography, sculpture, and perceptual design, offering a rare synthesis of thought and form.

The gallery, with its blackened walls and immersive scenography, feels almost alchemical in itself—a chamber where materials and meanings transmute before our eyes. Curated with a restrained theatricality, the space encourages slow looking, reflection, and a sense of somatic engagement.

Isabelle Moreau: Sculpting the Vanishing

Positioned between two large-scale paintings, Isabelle Moreau’s sculptural bust appears almost as a relic—half excavated, half imagined. Moreau’s practice begins not in clay or marble, but in the photographic image. She manipulates photographs digitally, distorting facial structures and introducing ghostly aberrations, before translating them into three-dimensional form through casting. The result is neither classical nor futuristic—it is uncannily unfixed.

Her busts, such as the one exhibited here, bear faint features, smeared and unsteady, as though they were solidified mid-disappearance. Painted with pallid tones and adorned with surreal, fabric-like protrusions, the sculpture appears to be in conversation with both the baroque and the post-human. Crucially, the lighting plays an active role: spotlights exaggerate the shadows, and the reflected glow from adjacent artworks brings moments of clarity to otherwise amorphous forms.

What makes Moreau’s work compelling is its philosophical undertone—a study of memory and its inevitable distortion. Her figures do not present the self; they reflect the trauma of its vanishing. Rather than creating monuments to identity, Moreau builds artefacts of disintegration. Each sculpture is a refusal of fixed likeness, offering instead a kind of psychological ruin—one shaped not by the artist’s hand alone, but by the viewer’s own projections.

Moreau does not sculpt figures; she sculpts afterimages. And in this exhibition, her quiet presence becomes a haunting counterpoint to the more overtly gestural or photographic works surrounding it.

Kai Ueda: Painting in the Age of Interference

Kai Ueda’s paintings pulse with a kind of digital unease. At first glance, they resemble abstract expressionism filtered through the visual vocabulary of computer glitches. But closer inspection reveals an intentional paradox: Ueda’s works are deeply painterly—built up through manual layering, dragging, and erasure—yet they vibrate with the ghost of screen-based imagery.

The piece on view in Between Mediums exemplifies this tension. Harsh strokes of fuchsia, white, and black tear through the composition like visual interference, recalling corrupted data streams or paused VHS frames. The painting captures a moment of beautiful degradation—where form begins to appear only as it is being undone. Ueda, trained in both traditional Japanese painting and digital animation, brings a rare fluency to this hybrid language.

What is remarkable here is the refusal of stability. The eye searches for depth, a horizon, a recognisable figure—but the image continuously slips away. Instead, the work becomes an allegory for visual overload in the digital age—where clarity is fleeting, and all perception is mediated through disruption.

In Ueda’s hands, painting becomes a battleground between classical technique and contemporary noise. It is not merely a stylistic fusion, but an existential one: a meditation on how we navigate beauty, loss, and distortion in an age of endless reproduction.

Javier Estévez: Density of the Ephemeral

If Ueda’s paintings channel the logic of the screen, Javier Estévez’s photographic works defy the flatness traditionally associated with the medium. His contribution to the exhibition—a print composed on layered panes of glass—occupies the corner of the gallery like a portal. The image itself is hard to pin down: perhaps a skyline, perhaps a ruin, refracted into violet hues and shattered geometries.

What makes Estévez’s work compelling is its use of depth—not just in the visual sense, but in the material construction of the image. He prints multiple exposures onto translucent surfaces, stacking them with precision, allowing light to pass through and shift the imagery depending on where the viewer stands. It is photography as sculpture—image as architecture.

This particular work shimmers as it fractures. As light bends around it, certain details disappear while others emerge. The familiar becomes strange. In doing so, Estévez reminds us that photography is not a window to the world but a construction of it. His images are dense not because they are cluttered, but because they are layered with time, motion, and multiplicity.

The mirrored spheres on the floor—placed like orbs dropped from another world—extend this spatial logic. They reflect not only the artwork, but the viewer and the room, folding all dimensions into a recursive, immersive surface. As with paintings and Moreau’s busts, Estévez’s work asks us to confront our own gaze and the instability of the visible.

Varvara Dmitrieva: Rituals

Varvara Dmitrieva’s project in Between Mediums explored the ways in which attention, perception, and identity are shaped—and constrained—by contemporary regimes of visibility and speed. At its centre was a large-scale analogue photograph depicting a human figure engulfed in leaves, suspended between movement and stillness. What at first appeared pastoral gradually revealed itself as an image of resistance rather than retreat. Working through analogue darkroom processes, Dmitrieva foregrounded slowness, physical labour, and the body’s relationship to time, insisting on image-making as a material and durational act. The vegetal and masked figures that emerged throughout the work resisted fixed legibility: they did not perform identity so much as inhabit a state of transition, suggesting a self assembled through encounter rather than inherited form. Embracing the irregularities of grain, exposure, and chemical interaction, Dmitrieva treated the photographic surface not as a neutral support but as a site where perception could be slowed, tested, and reoriented. In the context of the exhibition, her work proposed a quieter but no less radical mode of looking—one that values ambiguity, opacity, and attentiveness over immediacy and explanation.

A Threshold Space

The genius of Between Mediums lies in its refusal to resolve. It offers instead a threshold—a space where one might sense the synapses firing between forms, traditions, and temporalities. Every piece is in dialogue not just with its neighbours but with the environment itself. It is a show that asks viewers to move differently, to see across disciplines, to accept the artwork as a verb rather than a noun.

As the final chapter of CARC LAB/2021, this exhibition is both an endpoint and a beginning. It posits hybridity not as a novelty but as a necessity—an ethic of making and seeing suited to our fractured, accelerated age.

Between Mediums doesn’t just challenge how we categorise art—it challenges how we perceive reality. And in doing so, it honours the highest ambition of contemporary art: to remake the world, one glance at a time.

For more on CARC LAB’s research and future exhibitions, visit atticusgallery.co.uk