Gallery EXIT Until September 11

Summer exhibitions can sometimes seem a little haphazard, as new projects and grand openings are generally held off until the weather cools and the travelling masses return. It is in this sweaty interim that galleries line their floors and walls with the remnants of the previous years’ shows and hope that something cohesive comes together. Linking the work of separate artists working throughout various locations is a considerable task at any time, so it is to the creative curatorial credit of Rachel Wong that within the collective confusion of the summer months the work of the seven artists included in idée fixe do in-fact have a narrative; it may appear somewhat tenuous, but it flows.

The tea-stained figure in Enpei Ito’s A Woman in White is a precise study of the flowing folds and wrinkles of fabric and skin. Ito’s eerie elongated figure has a restrained sense of lost beauty that is achieved through an in-depth look at texture. This study of organic pattern prevails on the opposite gallery wall in Huang Zheng’s Shedding Skin, a new beginning 4, which is a painstaking viewfinder that morphs skin into an unsettling coating of individual hairs.

Zheng’s attention to detail is taken even further through Kenichiro Ishiguro’s hyper-realist painting, Living in Idleness. The intense colour and literal depiction of a solitary figure concealed but simultaneously out in the open is directly mirrored in Mei Zijia’s dark collage Poison. While both artists and paintings come from vastly different creative ideals, there is a quiet conversation happening between them that makes sense of their communal presence.

Mary Agnew