Clémentine Bruno’s complex praxis can be condensed into a study of painting’s presets and indexicals, working through its genres and repetitions as a means of questioning the painter as singular genius. If we liken the writer to the painter, as Bruno posits in her work, words as much as images are infinitely interchangeable to produce different narratives and visual compositions. 

She has presented two solo exhibitions at Project Native Informant, Ironclad Contract, 2020 and Then We Are Both Satisfied, 2020, each exhibition held works as groupings that are suggestive of the form and grammar of language, Bruno draws attention to the constraints of painting to derive meaning in a linear sense. Throughout her practice, she mines the art historical canon, making use of both identifiable as well as obscure references, each work could be compared to a word that when seen together read as a disjointed narrative. 

In 2021, she presented a solo booth, 10 to 16 at Frieze Art London. She has upcoming group presentations with Fluxus Art Project at Nicoletti, London and Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing. 

British artist Sean Steadman is first and foremost a painter. Steadman is invested in the medium’s specificities and its ability to draw out new visual forms. His practice arises from research into the history of image production, from the prehistoric to contemporary visual culture. His process is essentially intuitive and dialectical: after an initial drawing phase, Steadman works on the entirety of the canvas’ surface, applying, erasing, layering until a suitable starting point is achieved.  This initial phase is deliberately fast and decisive, so as not to allow critical reflection. The actual making of the image occurs through what Steadman refers to as the “digging down, where the painting is as much uncovered as it is built up from the outside”.

As seen in his solo exhibitions 1,000,000,000,000 and Cascade, all at once, the paintings appear corseted, perforated, entangled, swollen, or torn, insisting on aggregation through anarchic exposure. Through multiple phases over many months, the final composition can often deviate wildly from the original starting point; however this first phase anchors the works later developments. Steadman’s paintings marshal space, even if their structures are utterly mercurial. They are dialectics of schisms, sediments, breakages, the pulverulent and protuberant of colour and composition.