Matt Carey-Williams

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Fire - that arena of aureate light and fanciful celebration but also of feverish contest and the torment of Hades - signifies the belly of the earth’s mantle; the passion of the heart; the transportation of the soul from Earth to Heaven. Abbie Horberry’s “Aether” (2025), however, only reveals the embers of a fire about to go out – the sun about to go down or the last radiation of a star in a far-off galaxy. Heat is cooled to passages of papal purples, made cooler still by the nebulae of blue marks that float around the ground like shrinking ghosts. The wrinkles of the surface – perhaps a distant planet’s scars or the capillaries under your skin – also serve to contain this fire, offering cohesion through, ironically, a haphazard stream of lines that, in effect, function like a stream of consciousness: a thought process that, much like Abbie’s painted surface, eschews dimension or perspective and privileges an intertwined entanglement of mark and moment. The Polaris fire that offers the light to guide the artist and their viewer home burns gently within this composition. Nonetheless, it is a light that illuminates the interconnectedness of Abbie’s surface - the painted mark on the dyed ground enlivened by the meandering threads proffered by itself - but which also allows her surface to swell and slough between macro panoramas and snippets of quantum litotes. The mauve light energises this ongoing contradistinction, allowing Abbie’s surface to remain free enough to assume any number of planar or perceptual positions. This, in turn, further feeds the flux of the wind; the flux generated by seeing insects under a microscope or the moon through a telescope is akin to looking at a painting by Abbie. It’s a flux that transforms known into unknown, that abstracts reality, that ultimately offers the viewer a map – not an atlas – to free-fall into the very essence of Issa’s dewdrop. That moment of utter clarity followed by the silence of memory and longing. “Scene XI: a world of dew” opens on Wednesday 4 June. Come see. #emergingartist #contemporarypainting #artist #contemporaryart #artinlondon

05.29 18:48

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