Ealing, London: Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery announces a new exhibition, Antoni Malinowski and Hélène Binet: Pigments and Photons, which opens on 7 August 2024. This marks the first joint exhibition of Antoni Malinowski and Hélène Binet in a public gallery, celebrating their deep sensitivity and understanding of light and architectural space and form.
The works will be displayed throughout the manor house, conversing with the historic spaces designed by Sir John Soane. Malinowski explores the relationship between colour, light and space in what he describes as “light-sensitive pictorial instability”. Binet is adept at capturing the interplay of light, shadow, texture, and detail in photography. Long-time friends, the two artists recently began collaborating, united by their shared passion for architecture and how the eye reads tone and shade.
Malinowski’s paintings use specialist interference pigments to bend and scatter light, encouraging the visitor to shift their viewpoint and move around the room to experience different tones and qualities of the paintwork. His mixing of pigments with synthetic tempera, exemplified in Almost Seen (2016, Lapis Lazuli, synthetic tempera on canvas), achieves an optical play echoing that Soane employed to illuminate his rooms. Recurring motifs, such as the chair, hint at spaces for withdrawing and reverie, echoing the serene environments of Pitzhanger and inviting a deeper meditative contemplation of colour and light in the rooms.
Binet’s photographs in the exhibition focus on the figure of the angel, inspired by the numerous representations of female figures throughout the manor. Her series Angels from Ponte Sant’Angelo (2019–2020, hand printed b/w silver gelatin) captures details of the angel statues on Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome, revealing an energy and sense of immediacy to these graceful figures. These works resonate with Sir John Soane’s Grand Tour to Rome in 1778, where he drew inspiration from classical architecture and sculptures, including those on Ponte Sant’Angelo.
An intriguing aspect of the exhibition is the glass fragments displayed in the Breakfast Room. This assembly features items Malinowski has collected over many years, showcasing his deep fascination
with colour and light. The display includes segments of Murano glass tesserae, which sometimes appear in his paintings, a further nod to Soane’s passion for the quality of the light he encountered in Italy and his use of glass in trying to recreate this in some of his rooms.
Both Malinowski and Binet have previously done work in correspondence with Sir John Soane’s buildings. Binet’s photographic works include depictions of his central London home and collection at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In 2009, Malinowski had a solo exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery where he painted and drew directly onto the walls of the historic gallery.
Hélène Binet said, “The photographs selected combine details of angels’ bodies wrapped with animated cloths, giving you a hint that they could fly, and dry flowers that, seeing through the lens, can become wings. The camera transforms, displaces and suggests to give the observer the possibility to record their own story. The photographs are also carefully selected to flirt and dialogue with the subtle and ephemeral paint strokes of Antoni Malinowski.”
Antoni Malinowski said: “We live in a world of the senses, and our sense of colour is part of our life experience. A confluence of perceptual experiences allows us to be in the world; colour is an essential component of this sensual interplay. Often regarded as a secondary quality, it is, in fact, as important as haptic ‘seeing’ of an object. And, of course, colour is physically embedded in the microstructure of the materials that make art and comprise architecture. The echoes of the perpetual Grand Tour are present in Hélène’s photographs and my paintings. The recurring ancient themes filtered through pigments and light. We both work slowly—time becomes a folded dimension. Our conversation with Soane’s work is centred around daylight as experienced in space-time.”
Pigments and Photons runs concurrently alongside Pitzhanger’s other exhibitions: Grayson Perry: The Vanity of Small Differences and From Waste to Wonder: The Art of Sustainable Transformation, where contemporary art stimulates a new perspective of historic architecture.