When The Light Passed By: New Paintings by Gill Button
Part of SOLO Contempory / the British Art Fair, running from 25 – 28 September. More details on the fair here.
Gill Button’s paintings respond to the constant stream of images we encounter daily, articulating the split second of identification where an image touches a nerve and captures a complex of feelings. While her scenes are intimate, their subjects exist in direct relationship with the gaze of the other, as if their private moments were stories lived out in awareness of another’s attention. All have a strong cinematic quality reminiscent of the French New Wave. They also have a loose impulsive painterliness, contrasting softness with instances of intensity to echo the power of a moment of recognition or recollection.
The group of paintings in ‘When the light passed by’ are particularly cinematic, both in their settings and in their dramatic lighting. Figures recline in a field beneath the setting sun or lie sphinx-like beneath the glare of the moon. Flowers dazzle against a hazy landscape, just as thoughts of past loves still burn bright decades later. In Gill’s portraits colours bleed one into another much like memories over the years, blurred in definition but still retaining a poignant emotional charge. It is new romantic painting, immersed in a sea of visual stimuli from which moments of true connection still emerge.
Gill Button is a painter based in London who graduated from Kingston College of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘The Impossible Stillness of Light’, Chiesa di San Rocco, Palazzo Tiglio, Tuscany, 2024; ‘A Bout de Souffle’, James Freeman Gallery, London, 2024; ‘Echoes of Blue’, Han Feng Art Space, New York, 2023; ‘A Distant Glow’, Contemporary Art Now, Ibiza, 2023; and ‘Impermanence’, Soho Revue Gallery, London, 2023. Recent group exhibitions include I want You to Be Weak, as Weak as I am, TUBE Culture Hall, Milan, 2024; Unapologetic WomXn, Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale, 2024; Man Ray and Fashion, Mode Museum, Antwerp, 2023; Sotheby’s, Palais Oppenheim, Cologne, 2023; The Female Gaze, curator Beth Greenacre, The Stand, London, 2021; and Reveries (with William Brickel), James Freeman Gallery, London, 2021. Residencies include Han Feng Art Space in Shanghai and Room on the Roof at Debijenkork, Amsterdam in partnership with Rijksmuseum.
