Art is an escape from reality’ (Henri Matisse)
The title is suggestive in that it immediately encourages us to consider notions of unreality, fantasy or other exits from reality.
‘We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.’ (Lynda Barry)
This is perhaps the essence of artistic expression in this exhibition where the artist is on a quest for beauty through subjectively lived ideas. This ‘beautiful’ is a place where one can escape to, or an avenue leading though to a different understanding of the ‘beautiful’ – assuming life can be called beautiful – as opposed to exciting (‘to stay’).
Today more than ever we want to escape reality and the negative influence our civilisation is having on our lives (and which costs us lives). We want to abandon reality as we no longer trust it. This gives rise to some ethical questions: if the artist’s approach, as well as the end result of their work, are correctives to what we are seeing in our ordinary lives, then the answer can be found in escape through contemplation.
The body of work presented in this collection poses questions with great intensity, poetry, passion, engagement and analysis. The exultation of the act of creation through the use of subjective language calls all the more for communication with the other. And it invites one to escape through art.
