Matt Carey-Williams

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Water swims around Abbie Horberry’s “Salao” (2025) in delectable agitation with her typically amorphous yet correlative ground offering waves on a turbulent ocean in an orchestra of blues, pale lilacs and whites. Once again, her painted rivulets unite with yet resist against her corrugated, stained ground, their action – as dictated by the artist – intuitive and even automatic. More than any other work by Abbie in “Scene XI: a world of dew”, “Salao” embraces an approach to painting that mirrors the stream-of-consciousness writing found in novels such as Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and The Sea” (1952) or Clarice Lispector’s “Água Viva” (1973). Hemingway employed the sea to differentiate between known and unknown – the conscious and subconscious - but also to mark the oscillation between the two. So it is that Abbie’s ground peaks and troughs between marks knowingly executed and those that seem to fashion themselves. Her task being the orchestration and interconnection of the two. The influence of Hemingway on Abbie’s practice runs deep and particularly so in “Salao”. The title means ‘very unlucky’ in Spanish slang and Hemingway uses it at the beginning of “The Old Man and The Sea” to describe Santiago’s lack of fortune, having not caught a fish for the past 84 days. As already noted, chance and luck play their part in Abbie’s enterprise at her invitation, much in the same way that luck – or the lack thereof – does in Hemingway’s novella. However, fate, resilience and hope also permeate both Hemingway’s text and Abbie’s painted surface, and it is that shared defiance – of mark over ground; of motion over form; of (wo)man over the elements – that weaves its way through their synergy, articulated by the acuity of word and gesture as they revel in the immensity and mystery of otherness. A humdinger of a painting, “Salao” is a major part of my forthcoming eleventh Scene at my space on Porchester Place, opening tomorrow at 6pm. All are very welcome. #emergingartist #painting #contemporarypainting #artinlondon #artist

06.03 19:15

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