ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

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One of the reasons we respect and are drawn to artistic creation lies in artists’ ability to look at things differently; we are drawn to their vision of the world. On a more theoretical level, we identify with their mimesis: their way of pausing to observe and digest the real. Soft Focus brings together artists whose interpretations of the ordinary compel us to see the extraordinary in the most everyday things: walking down a staircase, absentmindedly touching one’s rings, going out at night, or performing a magic trick in front of friends. Through their proposals, the exhibition opens up a space where the viewer’s gaze, much like the gestures depicted by the artists, becomes slow, almost tactile, drawing attention to the weight of the unspoken.

 

Rebecca Storm, Billy Gibney, Jesse Zuo, and Daniel Fleur work from a sense of proximity, which they approach more as a method than as a theme: a way of seeing the world that has more to do with whispering or suggesting than with explaining or stating. The body takes center stage. It stands as a shared archive that, when observed closely, reveals intimate narratives: a repository of tensions, habits, and fears. A screen onto the inner world, a tangle of involuntary gestures in which anxiety, discomfort, and desire surface.

 

Each artist approaches this from a different place, yet they converge on the central idea of Soft Focus: like a sonar that captures faint signals from the ocean floor, the body perceives that for which we still lack words.

 

Billy Gibney paints from involuntary memory, the kind triggered by a smell or the texture of something that no longer exists. The works he presents explore the capacity of everyday objects to act as vestiges of the forgotten, reactivating memories buried deep within the psyche.

 

Through paintings of an almost intimate scale, Jesse Zuo highlights those moments when the body acts on its own: the hand searching for a ring, fingers tangling in hair. Automatic, nearly invisible gestures that reveal an inner tension even before it is consciously perceived.

 

Daniel Fleur draws from contemporary visual culture —images sourced from social media, scenes of celebration and consumption— and renders them through a slow pictorial process built on successive layers of ochre and grey that evoke the tradition of the Old Masters. The result transforms the fleeting, fast image into dense, enduring matter.

 

Inspired by tenebrism and her background as a photographer, Rebecca Storm constructs surrealist compositions that function like intrusive thoughts: governed by their own internal logic, her images appeal to the subconscious before being processed rationally.

 

Soft Focus brings together four artists who transform the fleeting moment into slow matter, insisting on repetition and proximity as a means of connecting with memory.

 

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Curated by Manuela Medina