243 Luz, Margate
Ben Gomes
“I have seen my death”, this was the exclamation of Anna Roentgen as she saw her skeletal hand for the first time upon being the first participant in an X Ray image, the imaging technology discovered by her husband Wilhelm. This is a moment that is revisited through Ben Gomes work, choreographed through digital imaging, painting and sculpture. The corporeal seeing of death that Anna is shocked into, in the reflection of her skeleton, places a question mark over the cohesion of the subject. As if the transparency of seeing inside, in its double meaning, might create a fatalistic rupture in her being. In Gomes’ work, this virtual reflection is explored through the heightened experience of looking at painting, looking is expanded through a co-habitation of painted object and surrounding sculptural framing.
The project explores a further material split between image and object, initiated by an expansion from painting into sculpture in their show “Outside”, a solo presentation of six works at 243 Luz in December 2023. The core of this new project, scales up the frame of the painting to become large form sculpture. Loo king toward the unruliness of solid metal as both boundary and potential host. The works present a process of collage, normally associated with the fragility of found paper, as opaque cast metal. Drawing on the signification of metal fencing and public boundary to place the emphasis on cautionary hostility within overlapping imagery.
