The bulk of works presented by Llewellyn-Jones were developed during a two-month residency at California’s Joshua Tree National Park during the late summer of 2024. Though geographically distant from southern Spain, the region offers an analogous, if much drier, flora that served as inspiration for the artist’s compositions. Whilst keeping the medium of photography as a foundation for his practice, Llewellyn-Jones took this opportunity to expand his exploits into other media without ever departing too far from photographic principles. For instance, a series of large black and white prints have as their starting point images he made with his Deardorff 8×10 Field Camera, focusing on the natural elements surrounding him in that environment. Upon enlarging the negatives, the artist painted over them with a mix of oil and glazing medium, introducing gesture and adding a new layer of meaning to the works whilst further abstracting them.
Two rubbing works on show also reproduce nature, whereby Llewellyn-Jones placed large rectangular sheets of linen over rocks and rubbed over them with oil pastel sticks. This naturally incorporated the various reliefs and textures of the rocks into the compositions. The results are sandy and colourful paintings that offer a poetic approach on how to copy nature. The artist is interested in the index of the object; the rubbings are the same size as the form it is directly taken from. Rather than a digital image, Llewellyn-Jones uses physical documentation through the record of its layers; this is like how he uses photography. The artist explains, ‘The material and indexical qualities of the analogue photograph itself are important, and the chemical processes used to achieve this’.
The work but the barren earth (2024) presents a small black and white reproduction of native desert flora. Instead of making a print from this negative, Llewellyn-Jones has chosen to paint directly onto the reverse, thus revealing a positive image. This is a signature work by the artist, part of a much larger group of negatives that he diligently develops himself in his studio. Noteworthy, he took a travelling version of his studio to California, a darkroom tent that allowed him to process his film and print photographs on-site.
It is against this backdrop of rocks, sand, and cactus that Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia presents her figurative oil paintings. Whereas Llewellyn-Jones’ works occupy the walls of the gallery space, Onwochei-Garcia’s large works hang unstretched from the ceiling, forming the shape of a house or an amphitheatre in the centre of the gallery, all the while allowing visitors to indulge in a ‘negative’ or inversed underpainting at the back of the washi paper. Three of the works are part of a series called “¡Silencio!” (2023) and are inspired both in title and in imagery by The House of Bernarda Alba.
Painted in shades of red, black, and brown, it depicts a group of barely human figures in an atmosphere of unrest, thus conveying pain and trauma. Onwochei-Garcia composed these works months after the Brexit Bill went through Parliament – and several years after the outcome of the EU Referendum in 2016 – borrowing the claustrophobic setting of a play written nearly ninety years before to express again such feelings of hopelessness.
Another painting on show, Los Espectadores (2023), uses the same palette of colours to again depict figures that are part-human, part-animal, and part-undecipherable. Yet here, on the right side of the composition, we see the clear depiction of a man, whose facial expressions place him somewhere between the fantastical worlds of Paula Rego and David Lynch. The artist often researches art historical and literary sources to compose her works, influences that are evident in her smaller works on paper (Capa y Espada, El Escondido and Fuera, 2024), such as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and whose aesthetics emulate Francisco Goya’s famous Black Paintings (c.1819-1823). In their own manner, they nod to the large canvases on show: one pastel drawing combines the front and back of Los Espectadores superimposed, while another highlights a detail from the back of the same work. This mix of international references and multilingual titles nod to Onwochei-Garcia’s own layered heritage: part Spanish, part German, and part Nigerian, the artist was born in England and currently lives in Scotland. This experience of in-betweenness is emulated by the very act of exhibiting her canvases as sculptural elements, allowing the viewers to pass through them, exploring angles and nuances that are not always permitted with works displayed rigidly on the wall. In her own words, ‘By turning paintings into structures that refuse to display themselves [they] frustrate the looking process as you have to twist, turn and rotate to see them, I intend to upset the privilege of spectating’.
