Review of Henny Acloque: Life After Magic at Ceri Hand Gallery

16/04/13

Henny Acloque: Life After Magic

Ceri Hand Gallery

12 April – 11 May 2013

Henny Acloque (born 1979) has just returned from a trip to Mexico. Whilst there, she visited the Island of the Dolls, a creepy destination hidden deep amongst the canals of Xochimico, attainable only via a two-hour punt. All around, decomposing, mud-covered, limbless, ghoulish dolls hang from the branches of the trees, just as they were installed by the island’s one and only inhabitant, Don Julián Santana Barrera (died 2001). Despite having a wife and children, Santana Barrera chose the life of a hermit, living alone on the island. After the tragic death of a young girl in the canals, some half century ago, he began to fish the dolls from the water and string them up in an act of exorcism, seeking to drive away an evil spirit and allow the girl to rest in peace. The place is haunting and sinister, and clearly left a lasting mark on Acloque.

Acloque’s work has long been concerned with the desire to capture the past, present, and future simultaneously. Her interest in portals has lent it a haunted (and haunting) quality. And this new body of work, forming her third solo show with Ceri Hand, with whom she has been working for five years, explores this dimension still further.

A restorer of Old Master paintings by day, and having been brought up in the countryside, it is unsurprising to find the basic substance of Acloque’s paintings to be fairly typical landscape scenes. In fact, the paintings in this exhibition are based more or less directly on the images from a Victorian book of fairy paintings she inherited from her father. Using, for the first time, oil on panel, Acloque then removes the ethereal subjects, replacing them with harlequinesque amorphous shapes, both implying and obscuring the presence of a subject: faceless and timeless, these new bodies exist in whichever realm one pleases.

The titles of the works are intriguing also, apparently bearing no relation to their content. In fact, Acloque explains, they are the titles of whatever piece of music she was listening to whilst she worked – and that, she laughs, could be anything from an eclectic playlist ranging from classical to Fatboy Slim, the rhythms in each case affecting the way in which the paint hits the board.

Alongside the paint works, the exhibition also showcases a number of drawings and mixed media pieces forming a series called Quimbaya, named after the Colombian civilisation, famed for its work with gold. Built up on top of etched landscape prints, Acloque has turned the skies into harlequin patterned backdrops for a population of fluorescent and glittery horsemen and trees. Again, the subjects are rendered eerily indistinct, and there is a fairytale quality to these magical scenes.

Acloque’s pieces are clearly working through extant ideas as well as the latest input from her travels. Whether or not these themes have now been fully exorcised, or whether they shall endure and continue to haunt her forthcoming output, remains to be seen.

Images:

Bendable Poseable

2013

Oil on board

15.7 x 19.6 in. / 40 x 50 cm

Photograph: Niall McDiarmid

Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery

Tarantella

2013

Oil on board

11.8 x 15.7 in. / 30 x 40 cm

Photograph: Niall McDiarmid

Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery

Quimbaya 2

2013

Mixed media on paper

12.5 x 9.4 in. / 32 x 24 cm
Photograph: Anna Arca 
Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery