Cahoots
2025
Phoenix Project Space
Brighton
Exhibition essay written by independent curator and writer Anna Moss
Poet Joachim Gasquet reported his friend Paul Cézanne’s instruction for spectators to ‘descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them’. 1 Cézanne’s remark proposes that pictorial ambiguity, or a lack of resolve in painting, can shape our most meaningful artistic encounters. We are finding our way with the painter, who rather than being an omniscient being gifted with some extraordinary insight, presents enigmas in visual form without promise. Just as a mathematician or scientist might ‘work out’ their calculations on a blackboard, certain marks on the canvas trace the artist's conundrum, be it material or theoretical. What is the relationship between this colour and that colour, this stroke of the brush and that one? How can complex sensations be reduced to the simplest of gestures? What narrative and symbolic undercurrents emerge without conscious intent? Where do the form and content of the painting diverge from each other, and at which point are they inseparable?
Cahoots is an exhibition that closely aligns with this idea of painting as a medium in a state of constant flux, something to be ‘figured out’, yet resistant to neat conclusions. Its title alludes to the ‘tangled roots’ of relationships — personal and professional, in Brighton’s artistic community. When we think of the word Cahoots, we think of secrets, scheming, conspiring. With playful irony, the exhibition represents the set’s commitment to the very opposite — generosity of spirit, sharing knowledge openly, and the steady cross-pollination of ideas. Institutional support and mentoring has lended a kind of collective and individual freedom that is indispensable in our present climate. This freedom finds its way into their artists’ handling of paint: bold, loose and inquisitive. Each artist eschews representation and flirts with abstraction differently, reeling us in one direction only to pull us back to another.
Olivia Guillot and Rosie Tuff work with suggestive forms, finding their strength in the understated: muted palettes and intuitive, unplanned draughtsmanship. Meanwhile, Joshua Uvieghara and Michael Clarence harness the potency of colour. Rather than being subordinate to form, they exemplify that colour can be the very conduit to exploring geographies and sense of place. For Pippa El-Kadeh Brown and Lydia Stonehouse, landscape is summoned through semi-abstract, gestural compositions, encouraging us to look slowly and feel form. Grant Foster and Kirsty Bell move toward the figure in human or animal representations that elude recognisability, playfully illustrating and splicing shape. For Alex Crocker and Henry Ward, similar tensions arise between shape and figure, internal and external landscapes. Investigating shape materially, Toby Rainbird and Ben Coleman use collage to divide the image, the fluidity of paint now including literal fragments of volume and texture. Daniel Pettitt and Georgina Stone return to a painterly fragmentation that is rooted in the sway between presence and absence: employing negative space and abstracted marks create a sense of simultaneous movement.
All fourteen artists demonstrate the vast possibilities inherent in the medium of painting. A dialogue unfolds. It is the formal qualities of painting, working in ways not immediately obvious to the eye, that are engaged in clandestine conversation. Beneath the surface, image is in cahoots with material, colour in cahoots with line.
1 In David Batchelor, Chromophobia, London: Reaktion Books, 2000