GILLIAN ROSSELLI

Episodes of The Whole THK Gallery 5 June–24 July 2025 Cape Town

Press Release

‘After everything is left in pieces, ’ this is where Episodes of the Whole begins—not with coherence, but with fragments. In this body of work, Gillian Rosselli returns to painting as a practice of assembling rather than resolving, layering colour, gesture, and emotion to explore what it means to be in the world when the world feels undone. Her work does not seek to represent; it attends instead to sensation, to perception as atmosphere, and to feeling as material. As Sara Ahmed suggests, emotions do not reside in subjects or objects but move between them, shaping the surfaces of bodies and the spaces they inhabit (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004). Rosselli’s surfaces pulse with this movement —at once intimate and collective, abstract and elemental.

It is this split focus—between the primal and contemporary—that informs the artist. Rosselli creates ‘episodic open narratives. ’ Her stories are inferred. While she exchanges ‘perspective for atmosphere, ’ Rosselli recognises that ‘perception is the challenging variable in both. ’ What matters is an ‘atmospheric quality’ and ‘energy’—the ‘raw pureness of nature’ , as well as ‘the chaos and tension that permeates contemporaneity’—a radioactive silence consumed by ‘the remnants of conflict. ’

A feeling one gets from a narrative, ‘based on details such as setting, background, objects, and foreshadowing, ’ atmosphere supposes context. However, it is also intuitive. In Rosselli’s paintings—stripped of perspective—it is a sensorium that is triggered—atmosphere as a psychic apprehension. Her Hatching series is blood-filled, biological, portentous. Childbirth is a core motif, but it is birthing more capaciously that is key. Her series, Genesis, evokes beginnings. But it is an ever-present nascent possibility that matters more.

Rosselli’s paintings are airy, light-filled, avian, liquid. Air and water are her elemental cognates. If the lightness of Rosselli’s palette has a precedent—Impressionism—she remains unconcerned with the spectral limpidity of an observed world. What matters, brought to the fore, is some snagged throb of airborne colour, some hovering, gentle, indefinable density. That which is conveyed is that which carries. Hers is an airborne art. Nothing is closed in on itself, everything is dispersed. Beauty lies in an exquisite glimmer, the iridescent nudge of grey and violet—a glimpse of magic in a troubled world.

Across her work, Rosselli does not offer us fixed meaning. Instead, she provides a space of return—a site where grief, joy, memory and tension co-exist without hierarchy. Like nests, her paintings are assembled from remnants: intuitive, unstable, vital. Resisting resolution, they assert presence—holding space for light, for feeling, for the fragmented episodes that compose the whole.

Press release courtesy THK Gallery. Text: Ashraf Jamal.