Date: 14 - 24th June 2025
Purist Gallery, King’s Cross Road, London
Artists: Louise Gaubert, Tommy Jayne, Zac Merle, Xinde Ren
Exhibition Text Installation views
While the notion of “paradox” has been discussed within philosophical and economic contexts, it has primarily been confined to formal logic and cognitive structures. As a result, the term is most often associated with the realm of logic. This project aims to liberate “paradox” from traditional frameworks of logic and rational analysis, shifting the focus toward the paradoxical mechanisms embedded in perceptual experience, abstract language, and the dynamics of viewing. From the viewer’s perspective, it aims to activate the kinds of perception that elude purely rational capture.
In the context of contemporary art, this type of paradox does not highlight the failure of formal logic, but instead reveals a generative tension and conflict: from abstract concepts and hazy states of consciousness to feelings that language cannot fully name; from symbolic theoretical systems to the construction of visual language. The process of creating an artwork inherently carries a contradiction between expression and the inexpressible, preserved through sensory dimensions like material, composition, rhythm, colour, and even scent.
Once this abstract visual language enters a concrete exhibition context and is perceived by the viewer, it undergoes various degrees of compression and progression. What this exhibition aims to highlight is precisely the “lost data” within this compression—a translation of emotion that occurs in real time but defies restoration.
In the gap between visual language and rational logic, emotion becomes the medium. Emotion does not adhere to logic, does not justify itself, nor wait for validation—yet it holds the most immediate power of transmission. It becomes the receiver of paradoxical perception and offers a way of generating meaning outside of knowledge systems. As Madsen states in Mood Over Content, emotion is not “about” something—it is the energy and aftershock of art itself. Between the work and the viewer, the untranslatable becomes the very stage on which emotion emerges.
On Artworks:
Louise Gaubert’s work What Remains is placed near the gallery window. I feel fortunate to have encountered this piece. The concept stems from a shared, deeply personal experience many of us have with windows. Traditionally, a window offers ventilation, transparency, and a sense of connection with the outside world. However, in my own memory, the kitchen window in my grandmother’s home faced a blank wall. Stripped of its ability to see through, the window became a hollow ornament—bringing with it a sense of enclosure, suffocation, and unease. Louise salvaged these old windows from the street, treating them as offerings to memory. Viewers are drawn into a space suspended between seeing and unseeing: gestures, silences, and messages that were never delivered.
There is an obvious sense of conflict in Tommy Jayne’s work: The Spear is an instinctive response to domestic violence. Sharpened blades are stitched onto incongruous objects, while wax drips in the corner with a strangely anthropomorphic emotion—an accidental, yet poignant touch. This serves as a successful symbolic transformation of emotion. Tommy retains theatrical elements in his practice; these objects are charged with new energy. Their original functions are dismantled and reconfigured through narrative, allowing emotion to emerge as a new kind of functionality.
Zachary Merle’s creative inspiration comes from deeply personal experiences. Memory blanks, fragmentation, and a sense of absence lend his work a puzzle-like composition. Reclaimed pallet planks are stained a warm, deep brown; suddenly relieved from bearing immense weight, they merge into four sides of cushions that belong to the home. Where does this softness originate? An unidentifiable man, mysterious black-and-white crops—forgotten, yet still drifting. Sharp screws drill into paddings from behind like untimely jolts of electricity in the mind, muffled in unseen corners.
Xinde Ren titled her commissioned work for this exhibition Stumble on Air — a poetic contradiction where one trips over something as intangible as air, something that, by nature, should offer no resistance. This gesture echoes the logic of the “bootstrap paradox,” in which events are trapped in a causality loop with no clear origin. Everything appears coherent, yet there is no beginning—like a person suddenly stumbling without an obstacle in sight. How does one fall when nothing is there? To trip over something nonexistent is, in essence, to be caught in a web of causality that never truly existed. The CRT television plays a clip from the sitcom Friends—a show widely recognised as a symbol of warmth, humor, and love in human relationships. But once this familiar scene begins to distort and shift, can that sense of comfort and safety still be felt?
A room once filled with laughter gradually slips into a strange unease. The space seems to dissociate, quietly posing questions:
"Why am I here?"
"Why do I feel tense, even though I'm inside a home?"
"Why is there a conflict between what I see and what I feel?"