The Coleman Project Space autumn programme begins with Trailing Clouds of Glory, a new exhibition featuring Theo Ellison and George Shaw.
Extending far beyond its 18th century origins, Romanticism’s seductive push for nature over artifice, passion over reason, idealism over reality and nostalgia over progress, continues to feed into our Lacanian desires.
This exhibition digs into the enduring appeal of Romanticism as a poetic mode of thinking, exploring its ties to gothic kitsch, its resistance to irony and its uneasiness with emergent technology.
Drawing on their overlapping points of contact, both artists navigate their wavering attitudes towards the Romantic viewpoint, at once indulging and undercutting it. Shaw’s self-portrait sees him answering nature’s call in suburban woodland, his back-to-camera stance echoing Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’. Ellison’s animated bird skull voices absurdist narratives, testing the Byronic hero archetype outlined by the likes of Friedrich’s wanderer.
The tactile glint of Shaw’s Humbrol paint contrasts with Ellison’s digital flatness, framing Romanticism’s Luddite roots as a prelude to our anxieties around AI. Ellison’s Byronic Hero includes an AI-mediated version of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006). Slowed down to 24 hours via newly-generated frames, the film’s sincerity is magnified, teasing out dreamlike HD-ready vistas. In parallel, Shaw’s Native Land (Altered) openly flirts with earnestness. Showing a heart symbol graffitied onto a large tree trunk, its layered enamel lustre forms a hazy memory.
Swaying between irony and sincerity, with works ranging across painting, print and video, this show reflects on Romanticism’s evolving ability to lure us in whether through the sublime or the ridiculous.
George Shaw (b. 1966, Coventry) uses Humbrol enamel paints, a medium traditionally used to colour Airfix model kits, to depict the locales, faded parks and terraced streets of English suburbia.
Theo Ellison (b. 1990, London) uses video and text to tease out our vulnerability to romanticised narratives, exploring how they shape our relationships with nature, technology and nostalgia.
Coleman Project Space, 94 Webster Road, Bermondsey, London, SE16 4DF. Preview: Friday 27 Sept, 6 – 9pm. Dates:28 Sept – 27 Oct. Times: Fri – Sun, 12 – 6pm
