Longspring

Luigi Zuccheri
Sara knowland
Andrei Pokrovskii
06/09 - 03/10/2025
 

Longspring refers to a landscape in transition, to the harvest season that spans the works in the exhibition. While it exudes a sense of rural bliss and seasonal cycles, something feels amiss: a tension and alienation creep into the familiar horizon, as the hierarchy between man and nature is reversed.

 

Among the artists, Luigi Zuccheri emerges with an original pictorial idiom shaped in defiance of his conservative surroundings. Zuccheri’s paintings depict small figures engaged in busy rural existence, while the surrounding nature becomes enlarged and disturbingly present. A cabbage rises monumentally from the ground with a farmer standing next to it, barely more than a passer-by, accompanied by snails that reach up to his hips. The proportions are distorted and the perspective is unstable, reducing man to a wandering, sometimes miserable figure in a world that pushes him back. This is not a naïve ode to the landscape, but rather a critical, often misanthropic representation in which man is relegated to the margins. Zuccheri paints this world as a stage, with compositions evoking theatrical curtains and staging, in which elements of religious iconography are replaced by animals, plants and objects.

 

Theatricality also resonates in the work of Andrei Pokrovskii, who explores the representation of space and the process of becoming attached to places, whether they are real, mythical or virtual. Like a stage designer, he creates closed and isolated systems of courtyards, passageways and cloisters that function as scenes in which space itself determines the action. The figures appear static and almost frozen; in Flower Clay. For example, three lost men stand motionless like decorative monuments among the trees. Occasionally, the trees appear to lean towards the human form, while the figures seem to turn to bark, as if the balance between man and nature has quietly been altered; an autumnal inversion that echoes the fading of seasons. In Kennel Kid, a lonely child sits at a dinner table, bewildered by the cutlery and the surrounding architectural emptiness. The image embodies vulnerability and alienation, showing a kinship with the visceral dimension present in the work of artists such as Roger-Edgar Gillet. Ultimately, Pokrovskii reveals that humans in his work are no longer protagonists, but mere extras within an overwhelming scenography that silently pushes the minto the background.

 

Sara Knowland’s works provide for some disruption to the visual language of the exhibition. In her practice she examines patriarchal social structures and historical visual cultures, for example through the imagery of witch hunts, moments in which femininity was suppressed, pinned down and declared a threat. In her recent works she temporarily suspends this focus, shifting instead to imagery which infers the masculine. The paintings presented here showclose-ups of turkeys, symbols long linked to seasonal feasts and harvest abundance. Their grotesque, fleshy snoods,rendered in vigorous brushstrokes, appear at once phallic and unsettling. Materially and formally, Knowland pays attention to the surface tension of her paintings, in which no single element dominates another This creates a kaleidoscopic visual language that does not strive for an unambiguous interpretation, but rather allows viewers to oscillate between revulsion and fascination, and the raw and the refined.

 

Text By Pieter-Jan De Paepe