Transparency – a group exhibition interpreting the intangible

Transparency is an elusive concept. At the borderland between here and beyond, between substance and transcendence, it’s a particularly interesting concept for artists to explore. For some, like Priya S. who erected an empty golden door frame, it represents an invisible threshold, inviting each one of us to step across and become a true servitor of the Divine.  For Jean-Luc, whose hypnotic video of swimmers appearing and disappearing plays with the elusive boundaries of being, the transparency of water represents, as he puts it, the innocence of the child.

On the other hand, Marie-Claire describes her transparent glass head (‘Aspiration / Transformation’) as representing the purification of consciousness through the emptying of memories, and this sense of stripping things back to essentials is also figured in Saravana’s ‘Speaking root’ and ‘Venation’, which expose the underlying structure of natural forms. Nature herself is the artist in Mariana’s photos of dragonfly wings, inspiring her to soar: You are yourself made transparent, so dare to open heart.

Transparency as a new way of seeing is explored by many of the participating artists, including Sabrina whose porcelain ‘Liquid Matter’ evokes the hidden liquidity of form, while Dominique wittily invites us to imagine what lies beneath our feet through revealing, by means of a cut-out, the pattern hidden beneath a carpet. 

Group shows can sometimes be messy, chaotic, as differing artistic egos clash. Yet here one sensed complementarity. It seemed that each of these twenty four artists was taking part in a common exploration into the many dimensions of transparency. The result was very stimulating.

Complex eyes keenly attuned to the nuance intensity of light

write the day awake and in quiet whisper start to decipher the visions stained in liquid glass

see ahead, behind and side

become translucent all at once

feel ahead, behind and side

conjure worlds of subtle sight