Gallery Baton is proud to present 《Symphony of Selves》, a solo exhibition by David O’Kane (b. 1985) from 17 January to 15 February in its Hannam-dong space, Seoul. This marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition, which unfolds across large-scale and small-scale canvases, deconstructs the illusion of the singularity of the self by hinting at an inner life influenced by illusions mixed with memories from the past. With these works, which range from uncanny, playful and even humorous to absurd, the artist invites the viewer into an imaginary, interior realm that exists only in the half-light, just barely visible between the gloaming and dawn.
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Drawing on art historical references from Velazquez to Rembrandt to Francis Bacon, O’Kane develops one of his avatars in the mold of the artist self-portrait. Oscillating between self-aggrandizement, mystery, and suspicion, O’Kane’s bold paintings have both the feeling of deep seriousness and outright absurdity, which serve to both uphold and dismantle the grandiosity of the figure of the artist. While some of the works in the exhibition depict the artist-as-maker, others (nearly) violently reject it. Both in Gloaming (2024) and in Zwielicht (2024), a figure wrenches a canvas from its easel. As the artist writes: “One of the first motifs I deployed in this series of work was that of the canvas fabric itself. It is the material that holds the illusion on its surface, the vehicle for the magical act of making a painting and a metaphor for the fabric of our subjective world.” The figure itself is abstracted in the act of unveiling the work.
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While the works are unified by their cast of ghostly characters, they – both as individual works and as an oeuvre – resist a singular interpretation. Like the ghosts themselves, their stories seem at once concrete and ephemeral; and each painting hints at a narrative that is always just out of reach. In Catching Light (2024), for example, two figures pose playfully, the ethereal shape of the canvas dancing between them, while light drips down from above making only the tiniest hint of a splash. This push and pull, the dance between what has already happened and what is just about to occur, is emblematic of O’Kane’s work. Indeed, with his keen sense of humor, the artist playfully engages the viewer with hints of a narrative arc, which he deftly denies just before the illusion is revealed.
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Catching Light
2024 oil on canvas, 140 x 100 cm -
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Who is the artist behind the easel? Who is the wizard behind the curtain? Is there anyone, or anything, left behind when this ghostly façade is torn away? Does the ghost disappear, becoming a bright light, which whisps away into thin air? Or is he simply a small child, playing with paint?
This duality reappears across the characters in O’Kane’s work. A master of light, the figures O’Kane portrays feel otherworldly and mysterious, yet are firmly rooted in the physical world. Hints of body parts in his works interrupt the airiness of his ghosts as they flit across the canvas. His smaller-scale works, which focus on a pair of childlike ghosts, have the playfulness of two brothers dressing up to perform a play, just about to be staged in some warmly lit family room in some imaginary space and time. The artist himself references this mysticism in “allusion to Plato’s allegory of the cave: through the use of shadows, I attempt to point to something beyond, something felt, yet still not fully known, and perhaps unknowable.”
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