Artists: Amelia Bowles - Caroline de Lannoy

IONE & MANN presents Read-Only Memory, a two person exhibition bringing together new and recent work by artists Amelia Bowles (b. 1993, London) and Caroline de Lannoy (b. 1962, Brussels).

Read-Only Memory (ROM) is a type of non-volatile memory used in computer/electronic devices to store permanent data. The simplest type of solid-state ROM is as old as semiconductor technology itself but the term became more widely known in the late 1970s and 80s in the context of home computers.

Referencing technological, societal, aesthetic and conceptual developments of the latter part of the 20th century as cornerstones of our world today, the exhibition is centred around a hard-coded timeless language shared by the two artists across painting and sculpture. Favouring abstraction and geometric, almost mechanical forms and relying on repetition, the use of the line, colour, negative space as well as precise, methodical execution, Bowles and de Lannoy create work that acts simultaneously as a stimulus and a depository of meaning, emotion, memories and dreams.

Throughout an artistic practice spanning painting, drawing, text, sound and video, Caroline de Lannoy works from a personal lexicon of abstract forms which she continually reorganises within the visual field to generate new and imaginative resonances. In this exhibition, she presents a series of paintings that investigate the complex possibilities of the rhythms of everyday life and the passage of time through linear and circular formations as well as spatial and chromatic decisions.

Intent on negotiating not only what is seen but also what is felt, she draws on the spectrum of sensory perception to map or often orchestrate an experience. Her precisely painted lines, sometimes hard and sometimes soft-edged, reflect notions of movement and musicality, radiating with an acoustic energy amplified by the pulsation of the different colours around them. With hues ranging from pale to intense, colour also appears to function as an integral structural component to the work activating it in ways that seem to affect mood, oscillating between calming and energising, as if mirroring circadian rhythms. Through variations in tempo, tone, intensity, density and expression, de Lannoy aims to appeal directly to human emotions, evoking feelings and memories while keeping the narrative open-ended to include playfulness and hope.

Open ended, affective perceptual encounters are at the centre of Amelia Bowles’s practice, which is primarily sculptural. Drawing on references from the fields of painting and architecture, as well as the language of diagrams and engineering, she makes use of the activity of light, colour, form and what is immaterial to create three dimensional structures that can be explored from multiple viewpoints, orchestrating a multi-layered sensory and contemplative experience.

Following her debut solo exhibition at the gallery earlier this year, Bowles returns with a body of work once again created in response to the space, relying on linear geometric compositions, the effect of light and shadow, but also the activation of the ‘false voids’ that occur from the spatial relationships between the different elements of the work and the way the audience interacts with it. Still interested in the effects of colour and varying degrees of light and shadow on our circadian rhythm, mood and well-being, she has chosen the subtlest of tones, offering a crisp, wintery palette of blue, grey and white (both often defined as achromatic). The subtlety of colour perhaps brings forth other qualities of the work. Paradoxically for stationary objects, Bowles’s structures seem to explore and invite movement as their effect and how they are perceived shift as you walk around them. There is also the underlying musicality of the tension holding the different elements of the work together, with repetitive patterns functioning as tempo or as an infinite loop which reassuringly references self-repeating fractal patterns occurring in nature.

Bowles and de Lannoy share a language that is clearly structured and confidently expressed, relying on a solid conceptual basis. Although this shared language is abstract, concise and geometric, the starting point for both artists is the human experience, which opens up a myriad of possibilities. De Lannoy’s works appear to escape the confines of painting with a musicality and a pulsating energy that reverberates loudly from her quiet, minimalist canvases. Bowles’s hard-edged, almost mechanical structures are softened by a painterly sensibility and a comforting familiarity that renders them tender and intimate. Simplicity of form and abstraction seem to serve as a type of universal grammar** that allows the work to exist as a container of shared experience, a portal to individual expression, or to simply create and hold space. The artists are abstracting from the complexity of the human experience within everyday life, retaining shapes and symbols that may act as gateways to transportative encounters or as safe anchors to the hardware of our time and our lived experience. At each waypoint of our journey, we have the opportunity to start again; Bowles and de Lannoy’s work allows us to retrieve our fundamentals, our essence, like a solid-state springboard for infinite potential.