ILANA SAVDIE: ECTOPIA
White Cube is pleased to present Ectopia by Ilana Savdie. The exhibition presents new paintings and works on paper that develop the artist’s exploration of performance and theatricality as responses to structures of power.
May 31 - July 27, 2024
In this exhibition, the artist focuses on the concept of spectacle and the figure of the hero that emerges from it. Through her works of acrylic, oil and beeswax, Savdie looks to intersections between the biological world and the folkloric to address modes of adaptation and survival, while challenging encoded binaries such as predator/prey, pleasure/disgust and verity/artifice.
Everywhere, tension builds only to be undercut and flooded by looseness, in a melodrama in which texture invades flatness and flatness supersedes texture. Transposing themselves from surface to surface, the abject bodily fragments that populate these canvases become augmented through repetition.
Oscillation between opposing states pulsates through Savdie’s work like a lifeblood, with sabotage of one by the other a constant threat. This is true not only of figuration and abstraction but also (lying as these themes do at the heart of both art-making and bodily experience) of pain/pleasure, control/chaos, part/whole, artifice/veracity, one/many.
Mining the dark underside of this ‘spectacle of excess’, as Barthes described it, Savdie casts a shadow of doubt over such an alluring show of conflict. For the philosopher Guy Debord, the shininess of the culture of spectacle harboured within itself a tendency to convert everything into mere representation, or ‘simulation’, providing entertainment at the expense of lived experience.
Himself partial to a tussle, Kafka’s writing explored the power dynamics that were central to the state structures (both social and familial) that shaped his world, as well as the innate potential of the body, particularly the male body, to undo itself.
The orifice-like openings and orbs that resemble eyes, mouths, anuses or black holes punctuating her canvases suggest the thresholds where matter is both ingested and expelled in a continuous cycle of bodily, psychological and emotional processing. It is like witnessing an erratic metabolism at work, of the kind Sillman outlines when describing painting as a process, which here extends to the visceral act of viewing too.