JARILAGER Gallery is pleased to present Ways of Seeing, a group exhibition featuring Johnny Abrahams, Simon Burton, Paul Cole, Idris Khan, Erin Lawlor, Charlie Oscar Patterson, Kes Richardson, Spiller+Cameron and Matthew Stone, together with South Korean painters Joong Baek Kim, Young-Hun Kim and Yun-Kyung Jeong.

Ways of Seeing was conceived by Jari Lager and gallery director William Gustafsson as a passionate tribute to John Berger's eponymous book, Ways of Seeing. First published in 1972, the book is celebrated as one of the most compelling and influential books on art in any language. Stimulated by some vital aspects 'thrown into relief by a modern historical consciousness', Berger inaugurated an excitingly revolutionary, starkly anti-academic way to look at pictures. His motto—Seeing comes before words—popularised the attitude that art should be for all, while conferring images the power to broaden experience in areas where institutionalised knowledge is inadequate. Not only personal experience, but also the general aesthetical experience of our relation to reality and its potentialities.

Lager and Gustafsson have proved to be loyal readers in organising an exhibition which pushes the limits of painting beyond figuration and questions the resources of sight when we come to terms with abstract expression. During all its history, abstractionism has been inseparable from a certain 'destituent' authority of its language, that is the peculiar authority to challenge our image of reality. One of the main aims of abstract art was to show that what is at stake with reality is much larger than ready-to-use objects, purpose-driven operations and mechanical laws. Within abstract art's supreme use of tones, lines, colours, shapes and textures, images of reality have become non-consumable, insubstantial, unfunctional, free. These images confront us, not as a defeatist escape from reality, but as a reminder of what reality might be in its quintessential elements.

Ways of Seeing similarly invites us to let these elements enter the mainstream of our sight. It encourages us to welcome the indeterminate and the intangible as a premise for an augmented, higher sense of reality. Simon Burton's ghostly silhouette shapes and Joong Baek Kim's coffee-blessed symbolism align us with the magic perception of a profound structure of meaning. Their paintings require us to accept that the unconscious is real too. Paul Cole's practice is guided by the principle he is 'airing his dirty linen'. The paintings are private exchanges between himself and the surface, made public. Young-Hun Kim's psychedelic, multi-layered landscapes urge us to recognise that Nature is infinitely wider and more complex than a quantifiable asset of things to be exploited. Spiller+Cameron's collage faces and Charlie Oscar Patterson's spatial studies open us to the secrets of duality: neither singular nor plural, their reality defeats the rigid contraposition between the one and the many, surface und volume, stasis and movement. Erin Lawlor's expressionist brushstrokes and Matthew Stone's digital vortexes stand for the primordiality of pure gesture over functional action, just like Idris Khan's conscience yet unconscious writing and Yun-Kyung Jeong's neon inscriptions assert the primacy of signifiers over signification. Kes Richardson's cut-outs and Johnny Abraham's hyper-density fields teach us that if we dare to look close enough, we might be able to grasp the original geometry of colours, or even to see the point where two parallel lines intersect.

Seeing comes before words, indeed.

Press release courtesy JARILAGER Gallery.