JARILAGER Gallery Cologne is pleased to welcome the British artistic collective Spiller+Cameron for their first solo exhibition Olymps. Moira Cameron and Xavier Spiller-Cameron, aka Spiller+Cameron, are a mother/son duo who have been making art together for the past six years, continuing their family's multi-generational legacy of shared artistic endeavours. Their collaborative practice is one of extraordinary balance made possible by the pair's shared history and mutual appreciation for each other's aesthetics and values.

It is hard to put Spiller+Cameron's passion for the act of building a painting into words. They are constantly challenging their construction skills by meticulously de-assembling and re-assembling various materials and mediums, in order to achieve daring new colour combinations, alignments, and expressions of harmony. Spiller+Cameron love to talk about creativity as an alchemical process that turns the nothingness of the pieces into the unity of something worthy of contemplation. Their canvases are intricate collages of painted areas developed over the course of several months. Layers and surfaces from previous studio work are sliced and deconstructed into abstract components, then recomposed and sewn back together for the sake of symmetry and beauty. All of their works have undergone an alchemical process of transformation, having been broken down and destroyed, then restructured and reincarnated into one overall image – from fragments to gold. Instead of gluing the pieces together, Spiller+Cameron prefer stitching. Sewing brings the ultimate precision and structural element to the composition, and there is no better method to create the impression of flawlessly connected individual patterns. Once they are finished, they have a sense of sacred permanence.

The artworks displayed in this exhibition come from the series Angels and Gods and Constellations. Although abstract, Spiller+Cameron's towering panels are recognisable as totemic faces, primitive masks, protective guardians, or celestial forces. The exhibition's title, Olymps, was conceived under the necessity of finding a neologism for these archaic, yet unprecedented icons, while simultaneously assessing the ubiquity of their spiritual inspiration. The artists draw upon a common narrative of deity, with mythologies that aim to resonate with everyone, but they make it anew. Olymps sometimes take on human characters. Two ovals, situated near the top of the canvas, become two angel's eyes; a vertical line dividing the midsection becomes a nose; a scrambled series of marks along the bottom, a god's mouth. Sometimes they manifest as Platonic ideas and archetypal geometrical figures, such as floating sets of circles or triangles. It is no surprise that we are not able to see all these patterns at first glance—they always come after the appreciation of the paintings' scattered nature and proliferative energy. Unities emerge, eventually, as galaxies.

Spiller+Cameron's favourite artwork is The Origin of the Milky Way by Italian late Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto. According to the myth represented in this painting, the infant Heracles was brought to Hera by his half-sister Athena. Hera nursed Heracles out of pity, but he suckled so strongly that he hurt her, and she pushed him away. Her milk sprayed across the heavens and there formed the Milky Way. Spiller+Cameron's large canvases share the same mythological, universal potency of the old masterpiece. The duo creates links with the history of art to coin new chains of meaning and symbols for the present. Their Olymps were born when the Milky Way copiously spread across the heavens. Surfaces are puzzled together, faces cut apart and remade in constellations. Colours, textures, and forms find harmony in multiplicity. Up in heaven, the new religion will be abstract.

Press release courtesy JARILAGER Gallery.