REFRACT

For REFRACT, BOI founder Holly Lucas conceived the concept alongside Maison Enclave founder Audrey Freeman, developing a shared vision around movement, perception and the body. Holly then extended this concept into the exhibition. Chose every work in conversation with Charles Riva, and you can feel that exchange in the room. This is not two collections politely parked side by side. It has the intimacy of a dialogue between two people who look hard at things. Each painting, photograph and object has been placed as much for what it draws out of its neighbour as for what it is in itself. From the Charles Riva Collection come photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Avedon, two artists who understood better than almost anyone how a camera can hold a body, a face or a gesture in suspension. Around them hang paintings by Christopher Wool, Daniel Richter and Cécile Defforey, among others, canvases in which images are built up, broken down and remade. Together they become a meditation on memory and abstraction: what the eye holds on to, and what it lets slip. Bureau of Innovation answers with collectible design by Roham Shamekh, Sophie Dries, Kym Ellery, Tino Seubert, Rodrigo Garcia, Corpus Studio, William Guillon, Tim Vranken, G-iO Studio, Studio Valerie Name and Agglomerati, among others. Their materials and methods could hardly be further apart, yet each treats making as a record of time. Process is left in plain sight, so the objects seem to carry the memory of how they came to be, which, when you think about it, is exactly what the paintings are doing too.