Artists: BLCKGEEZER - Hoa Dung Clerget - Sophie Goodchild - Luca Longhi

Alma Pearl presents Porous Abstraction. The show features recent work by BLCKGEEZER, Hoa Dung Clerget, Sophie Goodchild and Luca Longhi. While exploring abstraction, these artists move beyond exclusively formal considerations to engage with themes of identity, memory, familial relationships as well as the vicissitudes of lived experience. The media used range from traditional oil paint to tiles, felted wool, glitter and culturally charged materials.

In her large-scale work Essence (2025), created using straw from vernacular Vietnamese brooms, Hoa Dung Clerget mines the legacies of Minimal, post-Minimal and Conceptual Art to explore and then reverse the displacement and fragmentation of culture encountered by the Vietnamese diaspora. Her artisanal production weaves themes of the domestic and displacement through objects charged with material gestures that build narrative content.

Luca Longhi’s Nothing really happened like I thought it would (triptych) (2025) inhabits spaces between abstraction and representation, touching upon memories and atmospheres, while also becoming the site of the artist’s painting decisions here enunciated through the building up of painterly material and then its erasure.

In this new series, BLCKGEEZER incorporates text from her own social media posts on to signature and powerful black monochrome supports. Written in a diaristic mode, the text reverberates and is animated through the painterly materialities deployed in the matte black that serves as a ground for the luscious glittered letters that convey the artist’s confessional words.

Sophie Goodchild’s We Both Begin to Writhe (2022) places focus on the symbolism associated with felt. Tied to seasonality and communal activities of sheepherding, felt derives from the need to protect and contain. Looking back at its origins and the histories of crafts, Goodchild explores the tactile element of felted wool and interaction with the fibres while contending with notions of touch, osmosis and motherhood.