Filippo Antonello: Aufheben

Kearsey & Gold present 'Aufheben', the debut solo exhibition by Swiss artist Filippo Antonello, curated by Roxane Hemard, Spatial Design by Thomas Brewin. The exhibition takes its name from the Hegelian concept of "aufheben" a triadic process of negation, preservation, and transformation. Antonello's body of work explores this very dichotomy between erasure and retention, examining what is lost and what endures in the act of creation.

Using bleach and ink on unconventional canvases such as velvet, denim, and corduroy, Antonello meticulously alters the surface until something new, and often unexpected emerges, reminiscent of exposing film photography. The paintings embrace contradiction - transforming it into a surface where the ephemeral and the permanent collide, where the viewer is simultaneously drawn in and pushed out. 

Autheben was shaped by Antonello's fascination with material language and the invisible mechanics of perception. The artist describes them as a negotiation between the realistic and the abstract - a loop where representation dissolves into materiality and vice versa. "The viewer eventually reaches a state akin to perceiving white noise-a point where the abundance of detail transforms into an almost intangible visual hum." Antonello's surfaces oscillate between states: image and erasure, structure and collapse, melody and rupture. There is no singular resolution, no concluding note. Rather than settling into a fixed form, the materials interact against one another, conjuring fields of vibration where meaning hovers, flickers, and disperses-"the paintings are less about representation than about tuning: the viewer is not positioned in front of the work, but inside its wavelength, caught in the recursive motion of perception and loss."