Freddie Foulkes presents Pleasure, a two-week-long exhibition of photography, painting, and sculpture by seven London-based artists: Louise Melchior, Chris Moon, Mia Casati, Anna Kowalski, Eva Dixon, Nick Aliberti, and William Van Hoorn, opening on Thursday 5th October 2023.

Born out of the work of Danish photographer Louise Melchior (b. 1973), Pleasure is a show of work concerned with the nuance of mundaneness. Melchior’s very particular practice is centred around what would, without her having photographed it, be deemed banal or insignificant. Creatively composed and exceedingly carefully captured photographs of anything and everything from rubbish to road-markings and car doors to carpeted floors are Melchior’s speciality. Something of the everyday that somehow or other manages to pass many of us by is something that Melchior so nobly aggrandises. She says: ‘The notion of recognisable nothingness as subject matter is something I keep returning to.’ And nothing can be more recognisable and yet simultaneously so nothing(-y) than the subject matter at the core of each of the three photographs she is exhibiting in Pleasure: the ephemeral nature of natural light.

These three photographs have been presented to Moon, Casati, Kowalski, Dixon, Aliberti, and Van Hoorn, in the hope that, by using their specially trained eyes and remarkable ability to communicate what they see and feel, they will empathise with Melchior’s distinctly detailed approach to recording lived experience. Whatever it may be in Melchior’s photographs that has captured each of these artist’s minds, what is truthfully the subject of these interactions is the age-old and boundary-blurring relationship between what are commonly perceived to be disparate disciplines: photography has long-played a fundamental role in painting and sculpture. Common knowledge ascribes the origin of this interdisciplinary relationship to the work of Edweard Muybridge (1830 – 1904), who, in the 1870s, pioneered a form of photography whereby high-speed movement could be recorded in such detail as it was not by the human eye. It was with gratitude and awe that artists as canonical as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Sol LeWitt looked at these early photographs. However, painters as far back as the seventeenth century, if not further, used the camera obscura (a combination of lenses and mirrors) to observe, seeking above all else nuanced gradations of light that it is tricky for the eye alone to at once observe, recognise, and record.

Nowadays, the role photography plays in the making of painting is such common practice. However, to exhibit the two together, the photograph and its derivative painting or sculpture, is not. Presenting an exceedingly rare opportunity to see their most recent work exhibited alongside their inspiration, Pleasure acts a guide, leading the viewer into the artists’ minds. One ultimately discovers just what it is that this fantastic roster of almost violently individual artists sees in Melchior’s (and my and your) everyday.