A vessel too heavy

Hugo Lucian Bou-Assaf visits 'Voyage', a group show at Morena di Luna, Hove

We must configure the ‘group show’ as an exercise of adjacency. Of a particular and precise relativity of things, of a particular and precise perceptiveness; this resin ear lobe, and this inflatable sexual contraception, this cedar wood instrument and this padded stocking - the group show aspires to know the ways in which works of art seek and reject company. Aspires to know which artworks desire to be amongst themselves, and furthermore the ways in which certain artworks yearn for separation, yearn to resist association, and all the breakages that this torsion implies. 

Morena Di Luna would like us to think of ‘Le Voyage Dans la Lune’ (1902) by Georges Méliès. One of the very first narrative moving pictures, shot in a gauzy, chalk mono-colour, in which a member of a native moon species finds itself on a returning interplanetary expedition vessel. This is expressed using a miniature model spaceship placed in the cheek of a man, his face covered in white foam; this is very early cinema, you see. Morena’s exhibition would like us to think of this film as something made in the spirit of voyage, of a physical and/or spiritual expedition. About going from one loosely defined place and into another.

There are some key interfaces at play in the modest two room display. Mike Silva’s oil on linen, strikingly varnished ‘Red Sleeping’ (2024) greedy with delicately painted creases and folds, depicts the act of splaying into a sleep, of falling into a new place. Conjunctively Jake Grewal’s charcoal on paper ‘Space to feel’ (2024) on the opposing wall, itself a dreamlike machination, abstracts a humanoid on a rocky frontier - forming a tunnel between the material of the bed sheet and the subconscious landscape. Voyage as a pinched crease in the fabric of the regency building.

 Sanya Kantarosky’s oil ‘Mother’ (2024) and A.W. Churcher’s eclipse contact print stand out as a graceful interplay of faith, phenomenon and distance. Savannah Marie Harris’s ‘Spiralling Ravine’ (2024) is a stylish, heavy, Auerbachian semi-abstract with bleeding primary tones, which I felt was shoehorned in; the same can be said for a pastoral Merlin James picture that voyages too close to the muggy coastal views from the gallery window. Lastly Jake Grewal’s salient oil ‘He moved fast beyond my eye’ (2024) contradicts the artist’s charcoal works, which form the cradle of the show’s imagination – only now Grewal produces a picture that left me longing for his earlier works’ surreal charm. 

‘Voyage’ seems to me, when it can shed its encumbrances, a series of desires. Desires of which the Méliès reference can be a pretty shackle across the artwork selection. An exercise in adjacencies of partial success; I think of cantankerously assembled garden telescopes, lustrous bed covers, velocity towards stars and dreamscapes.

Inversely the show seemingly clings to open ends that never quite find adjacency; a brilliant, confusing 8mm film about Robert Smithson’s wife being your mother, Frank Walter’s fibre Masonite portholes and Casper Heinemann’s bird box suggest a kind of mysticism that I struggled to attach to the initial film reference. A bloat if you will. Like a ship if you’ll labour it; pretty halyards, vangs, whips and jackstays, nevertheless a vessel too heavy to manoeuvre in all the directions the artwork desires to take it. 

‘Voyage’ runs at Morena di Luna, 3 Adelaide Crescent, Hove, 29 June – 15 September 2024