NATURALCULTURAL NIGHTS I

Naturalcultural Nights is pleased to present its inaugural showcase, featuring work by Cayetano Sanz De Santamaria, Kris Lamba, Eilen Itzel Mena, Laura Kiddie, Vasilis Avramidis and Laurence Jansen. These selected artists offer a jubilant and wide-ranging expression of nature manifest in cultural, physical and spiritual spaces. 

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Santamaria’s exotic creatures run amok markets and hazy sunsets, recalling his native Colombian coast, summoning the music, movement and magic of South America through surrealistic tendencies. Also deeply rooted in her ancestral background, Mena explores her spirituality of the Dominican Republic through expressive mark-making: her frenetic and sprawling lines render flowers or a more elusive life force. Her child-like visual language and vivid palette both evokes the heat of the African climate, as well as the sacred properties of colour in the diasporic Ifa religion. Similarly working with abstract, other-wordly forms, Lamba’s bronze sculptures are the result of a dynamic, rather than planned process: his manipulation of polymers through temperature demonstrates an elemental understanding of medium. His strange, intoxicating shapes parallel chaos within nature and its unbounded potential to create. 

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In Avramidis’ paintings, postmodern architectural forms are coated with verdant terrain, indicating the ever-present, latent symbiotic processes that underpin our environments. Jansen and Avramadis echo each other, with Jansen also deeply interested in architectural landscapes and urban ecology. His wide-brush techniques reveal both a translucency of pigment as well as traces of industrialisation: through deconstructed narratives, Jansen playfully interrogates the relationship between humans and how they move through space. Both Jansen and Avramidis posit ways of re-imagining the figure in landscapes or an alternate urban environment, drawing upon both art-historical and contemporary references. Depicting interior rather than architectural spaces, Kiddie’s works are richly textured, working the canvas through thick layers of paint as well as collage techniques, materially and metaphorically interweaving tapestries that tell the colourful life stories of places and objects. Concluding this mental and artistic odyssey through tropical climates and unfamiliar, utopian structures, the evening ends, much like Kiddie’s pictures, in a place of refuge and celebration: one where creativity and conversation flourish. 

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Anna Moss - Art Historian | Writer | Curator

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