Carole Ebtinger & Esther Gatón

phosphorescence of my local lore

23 November 2023 - 13 January 2024

South Parade is pleased to present a duo show of new paintings by Brussels-based artist Carole Ebtinger and sculpture by London-based artist Esther Gatón, with an accompanying text by Lucy Rose Cunningham (overleaf). The show pairs new painting and sculptural work by Ebtinger and Gatón, both practices exploring the potential to reside between spaces, to enter into shifting landscapes and then retreat back.

Through Carole’s works, daubs of blue, purple, gold and green wash across the room, conjuring the depths of a pool or a meadow haze. Such surfaces could also be emotional ones, recalling to past lives; of moments spent with loved ones, of heart break, of reconciliation with the self through such meditative motions.

Gatón’s shifting shapes accompany Ebtinger’s imagery, suspended and wrapped in bioplastic evoking natural forms suggestive of moss, mould and sprawling fungi. A makeshift ark, drifting towards - or away from - another world, another time and presence. With a self-imposed unregulated process, Esther makes use of found objects and materials gathered from daily meanderings and encounters, pointing to the notion of environments, atmospheres and lived moments, of opportunity and change.

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Carole Ebtinger (b. in 1995, in Vietnam) is a Vietnamese-French artist who lives and works in Brussels. Recent solo exhibitions include Tous Mes Jardins, Sarah Brook Gallery (Los Angeles, 2023) and Les Terres Rares, Eeckman Art Prize, Bozar (Brussels, 2021). Recent Group Exhibitions include The Room, South Parade (London, 2022) and Stealing Thunder, Barbé Urbain Gallery (Gent, 2022). Carole graduated with a Masters in Drawing from La Cambre (Brussels, 2018) and was awarded the Eeckman Art Prize by Art on Paper, Brussels (2021).

Esther Gatón (b. in 1988, in Valladolid,) based between Madrid and London, works across film, sculpture and writing. Esther holds the prestigious PhD cum laude title from the Faculty of Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain, where she is an Honorary Fellow in the Sculpture Department. Esther completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts between Saint-Luc Liège, the University of Barcelona and the Complutense University of Madrid. Recent solo and duo exhibitions in 2023 include My Jaw is on The Floor, Cibrián Donsotia-San Sebastián; Asleep on a feather bed with black curtains around him, an inverted torch (the earth was full of poppies), C3A Córdoba; and Emil Lime, CA2M, Museum Madrid. Recent group exhibitions in 2023 include STRAY Voltage, KINGS Melbourne; Concretos, MUSAC León and CAVE, Fondations312 Brussels. Gatón recently launched her publication Emil Lime at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (October 2023), as well as presenting talks this year at Istituto Europeo di Design, Madrid and WIELS Book Fair, Brussels.

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phosphorescence of my local lore

By Lucy Rose Cunningham

An arrangement of shadows thrown by leaves against

a wall. Clods of wet earth, alive post-shower.

The colour of my local lore,

deep greens to murky blues.

A subtle glimmer.

The word phosphoresce comes to mind, fireflies beneath rivers’ thin membrane. Movements holding memories you wish to scoop up with your bare hands. The propensity to collect, to recollect, to gather, to abandon, across canvas / wall / open expanse / open windows into the room and out again, to the secluded green found on a lost city traipse.

All the gardens, all the pathways. All the straying trellis sweet-peas, the straying brush strokes, the silken lines growing into stems. The first fronds. To smell these flowers, and wonder what she smells like when waking in the morning, when pining after a lover. After the after. What does loss smell like. What does reconnecting with the self smell like. Feel like. The skin as it opens up, receptive, blooming like lichen / lilies / lovesickness. Love, from thirst, to be quenched through saturation, the reapplication of dyes, of waters, such weight -

- of loving, of lusting, of living, collapsed into paper stretches, inks and heart beat. Body and spirit pulled asunder, pulled taught. Aches felt along the spine, along the framework to grasp onto, for fear of falling down / for / in towards another, caring too much or too little.

All the gardens, all the pathways. We take to the outside, determine the greenery that won’t subject us to more aching, but will remind us perhaps of where we have been, of where we might go. Grasses chorusing for us to come back to the earth; to shed human touch, shed the rejection of closure or not-knowing.

But grass hairs lick much like tongue, fingers and fleshed junctures. Never quite moving beyond memories that remain, nothing ever quite perishing, flickering in and out of comprehension. Inky reds to blues, the bloodlust of thunder overhead, the rain-cycle outside a cyclical bout of tears. You insist there is nothing abject about you, as you greet the mo(u)rning’s course ozone.

Outside, the locus of desire. Desire in the cellulose of man’s limbs and flower’s stem. Desire in speckled sweat pheromones, desire in a foliar day, when the air sips yellow to ochre to gold. Tasting limerence in sun-dewed firmament and soil, its gossamer mycelia swash; among root systems as they sing your ancestor’s tongue, a long drawn out note traced through the till of this land. One cannot bear to hear it. Another listens and echoes back.

But grass licks like grasses all the same, gesturing for us to simply wait / pause / acknowledge. To be with the soft drone of a hive in pollen peppered meadowland. To move forward. To be, in the in-between space - between trailblazing and being carried, between alight and simmering.

She is looking for those who mean it. For tenderness, saturation, a bleeding into the fabric of another. Her garden - here - to enter, to pause, acknowledge, go forth. Her garden, for those seeking tenderness too.