Painting is an age-old artistic medium that maintains an inherent distance from reality. Its indirect relationship with reality means that, by remaining at a remove, painting can acquire a certain independence and even assume a critical position. Yet this distance can also become an excuse for retreat. What is interesting is that, even when painting aspires to the former, as most serious artists do, it can only reconfigure sensibility and cannot seal an image into a fixed point of view. This is precisely what makes painting irreplaceable when it enters public discourse, allowing artists to engage with the world through it.
Bringing together sixteen artists, the exhibition focuses on changes now taking place in painting that have yet to be adequately named. Working from their own lived experiences, the participating artists encounter the world around them in different ways. Reality, imagination, music, popular culture, local life, and public space intersect throughout the exhibition, creating a diverse and heterogeneous field. Many of these painting practices are still evolving and have not settled into a single, stable style. This openness is accompanied by a self-reflexive impulse: the artists continually reconsider the experiences and visual languages on which they rely, asking whether methods that once proved effective can still respond to a changing reality rather than gradually hardening into habitual ways of working. Through this process, the painters maintain a keen sensitivity to reality.
The exhibition title, “I’ll Catch You Later”, uses a light, everyday expression to encapsulate an autonomous approach to artistic practice. At a time when information is increasingly fragmented and reality resists any single explanation, the painters use painting to create a range of spaces for more agentive approaches to artistic practice. In doing so, they temporarily step away from grand narratives that come with ready-made answers re-establish a creative relationship with their surroundings.