CARC LAB/2022: The Alchemy of Media

By Lisa Knoll

7/8/2022

Exhibition Details:
5–28 August 2022
CARC LAB/2022: The Alchemy of Media

Atticus Art Gallery (11a Queen Street, BA1 1HE, Bath)

Image © Atticus Gallery

In its final and most conceptually daring instalment, CARC LAB/2022: The Alchemy of Media arrives at Atticus Art Gallery in Bath with a rare and haunting cohesion. Bringing together four formidable talents—Ilja Nabutovskis, Isabelle Moreau, Kai Ueda, and Javier Estévez—this exhibition elegantly dissolves the distinctions between painting, photography, and sculpture, offering a 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 the exhibition 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 Nabutovskis’ photograph and Moreau’s busts, Estévez’s work asks us to confront our own gaze and the instability of the visible.

Ilja Nabutovskis: Figuration at the Edge of Infrastructure

Latvian-based artist Ilja Nabutovskis brings a psychologically charged material intelligence to the exhibition that is both rigorously conceptual and affectively slow-burning. His contribution here—a single, large-format analogue photograph—derives from his 2020 intervention Cold Water Repairs at Kunsthalle Nummer Sieben in Saint Petersburg, where he froze a series of radiators inside the gallery, allowing them to thaw gradually across the exhibition period. Rather than documenting the installation digitally, Nabutovskis set up an analogue camera on a slow, continuous exposure to register the melt as a durational process.

The resulting image is remarkable: a single photographic surface registering the passing of time not through sequence, but through compression. The accumulated exposure renders the scene ghostly and streaked, with layers of condensation, steel, and shadow collapsed into a unified blur. Printed meticulously in the darkroom using advanced optical techniques rarely deployed at this scale, the work stands not as a representation of entropy but as its index. It is photography as weathered evidence.

Nabutovskis’ practice is rooted in the infrastructural ruin of the post-Soviet domestic sphere—frozen pipes, leaking ceilings, patched walls—and his artistic method is one of quiet endurance. Rather than dramatise collapse, he dwells within it. His photographic logic resists the crispness of conceptual documentation; instead, it favours opacity, degradation, and attrition. The camera here is not a device of capture, but of pressure. It bears witness not to a moment, but to a condition.

In this context, the photograph exhibited at Atticus becomes both object and trace. Its blurred surface refuses immediate legibility, demanding instead a kind of ambient attunement. It is not a portrait of a radiator; it is the record of its thaw. The image holds time, but time has melted through it.

Nabutovskis’ work does not announce itself. It lingers. It hums with infrastructural memory. It offers a poetics of failure—one where systems do not break suddenly, but exhaust themselves slowly. His image is less a depiction of an installation than an artefact of lived entropy, pressed gently into light-sensitive paper and left, like the radiator itself, to cool.

A Threshold Space

The genius of CARC LAB/2022: The Alchemy of Media 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/2022, 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.
It does not simply 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