VISAGE

Curated by Juan Bolivar

11th January - 14th February 2024

Christina Barrera, Juan Bolivar, Nicky Carvel, Mark Connolly, Cyan Dee, Oli Epp, Liam Fallon, Luis Rafael Galvez, Charlie Gray, John Greenwood, Des Lawrence, Rebecca Parkin, Anthony Piper, Miho Sato, Toby Ursell, Julie Verhoeven, Richard Wathen, Tom Worsfold.

Oli Epp, Wet Weather Warning, 2022, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 180 x 200cm

Visage presents artists who share a fascination with faces, not necessarily portraits or a likeness, but a fascination with the face as an indexical repository of style. In the exhibition Visage the face is sometimes presented as a literal iteration of appearance or as metaphor: for ‘face value’, to ‘lose face’, to ‘face-up’, an ‘interface’, a ‘face-lift’, a ‘façade’, or a ‘face-off’.

Charlie Gray, Steve Coogan, photographed with an Alan Partridge mask for Empire, , 2015, Gelatin silver print, 67.3 × 101.6 cm

The exhibition borrows its name from 'Visage', the 80s synth-pop New Romantic band, whose original lineup included, amongst others, song writer Midge Ure and lead singer Steve Strange. Visage are best known for their hit single 'Fade to Grey'; a song described as a person's experience of feeling overwhelmed, alone in the world, struggling with life's challenges. The band's name 'Visage', meaning face, aptly coincides with changes in style in 80s Britain as 70s Punk, Mods and Rockers transitioned into splintering post-Punk movements and new aesthetics.

Luis Rafael Galvez. Mama’s Boy, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 53.5 x 40.5cm

In his autobiography, ‘Blitzed’, Steve Strange maintains he came up with the name 'Visage' as a portmanteau combining 'Vis’, which stood for the visual elements of the band, ‘Visa’, which represented the global aspirations of the band, and ‘age’, which symbolised the band's place in a new musical age. Although Strange's deconstruction of the band's name acts as a form of manifesto, a simpler meaning could encompass these changes in the faces of popular and wider culture. Shortly after the band's emergence, in 1980 Nick Logan spells out the changing attitudes and styles in this new panorama, in the iconic art, music and culture magazine 'The Face'.

Richard Wathen, Duet, 2023, Watercolour on 640gsm Hahnemuhle HP Paper, 48 × 36 cm

JUAN BOLIVAR

Born in Caracas, Venezuela (1966), Juan Bolivar is a London based artist, curator and Lecturer in Painting at the University of Arts London. Bolivar’s paintings employ cognitive games to set up dialectical oppositions between geometric abstraction and a second meaning; challenging and examining this genre’s currency today. As an independent curator Bolivar has curated over 50 exhibitions since 2001.

CLICK HERE FOR VISAGE AT BLACKBIRD ROOK