June 2013
THE GARDEN OF GOOD & EVIL
Works by AITCH & SADDO
June 7 – 30, 2013
Vernissage Friday June 7 / 7-10pm
Music provided by co-op students from the Capital DJ Academy who will play a mix of groovy tech house, nu-jazz, and deep house for your listening pleasure.
The Garden of Good and Evil is a series of new illustrations on paper, paintings on canvas or wood, part of a series of duo-shows Aitch & Saddo are doing this year, starting in Viana do Castello (Portugal), continuing in Ottawa and Halifax (Canada), and finishing in Munich (Germany) and Vienna (Austria).
Along the five years since they first met, they had numerous projects and shows together, amongst which a series of duo-shows at Supalife Kiosk and Box 32 in Berlin, and a more recent one at Calina Gallery, in Timisoara (Romania), called The Golden Hours, show in which they explore their two different visions on subjects like Time, Memory and Death. They’ve also painted a few murals together, most notably the one in Holon (Israel), in which they played with Biblical and mythological references about Jonah, infusing them with more fresh, pop features.
Both artists are fascinated by story-telling, myths and legends, thus their works have a magical and narrative feeling to them. They’re illustrating lost untold stories about magical creatures, and scenes combining light, fun, spiritual elements with more earthly and dark touches.
Both their works evoke a strange lost edenic world with lush vegetation and floral patterns and a bestiary comprised of real animals and also imaginary creatures which mix animal and humanoid features. The Garden of Good and Evil is an ambiguous concept, it can be seen as either a mythical space, the set for an abundance of fantastical characters, or an allegory of the world itself, in all its variety of shapes and contradictions. The recurring presence of birds and snakes in both artists’ works also brings Edenic, Biblical undertones, and a tension between spirituality and decadence.
Inspired by naturalistic illustrations, Oriental textile patterns, Naive Art. legends and folklore, Aitch creates colorful watercolor illustrations on paper, or characters cut out of wood, intricate beasts with bodies composed of birds, wolves, snakes, flowers, all evoking fantastical scenes of splendor and malice. It is an ongoing process that draws its essence from mundane experiences filtered through an allegorical point of view.
Saddo brings together primitive, tribal elements, with influences from Renaissance, old Flemish Masters and Bosch, in his complex, dark illustrations on paper, or in his colorful paintings on canvas or on pieces of found wood. In most of of the paintings he explores the presence of animals in different mythologies and legends of the world – from Norse mythology to shamanic rituals from South America – , mixing different influences and meanings into ambiguous, dreamlike scenes populated by hypnotic characters with animal features.