Vilma Gold is pleased to present Colin Lowe’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The Turettes Shroud will comprise of new sculpture and text based paintings.

The Turrettes Shroud sees Colin Lowe and his night-time companion Niloc Ewol attempt to manifest and communicate the psychic babble of the rubber room, the brain box of their wonderfully lunatic personal state of mind. Sometimes the mind is a labyrinth and blockages occur but quite often the pathology can be treated with a couple of nurofen and a joke. What appears bleak and traumatic to some can be flippant and easily digestible to others. The slights and irrelevancies, the side steps and misunderstandings that most people deal with everyday become the skiddy architecture on which to build an edifice of fragile hope.

Letters From A Padded Brain Cell started from a one off request for an unidentified medical interference into the insecurity of one mans mis management of his own meagre resources, (randomly picked from the Yellow Pages) but has now mushroomed into a correspondence of 30 or more letters. In this series the unconscious meandering and uncoupling of reason is examined and then repeated from the viewpoint of an imaginary farmer who has lost not just his land but maybe the plot as well. In some ways the letters trace a similar path to the letters of Van Gogh to his brother Theo, constantly calling into question the whole Universe (which exists as a psychic trip hazard) and finding imaginary unsettling signals everywhere, even in the SANELINE logo itself.

What appears to be a deranged Star Wars storm trooper crossed with a tramps imaginary fancy dress party on a night of self-torture, Pronounced D.O.A. treats self-goading to a game of tag with bad language. Various ways of humiliating/crucifying yourself are let out to produce an exo skeleton of pain with a head that is decapitated from the host body and not quite in touch with itself. The implication being that madness can find you at any age and that this might be normal, a victim without a cure, or the need for one. A black sheep of a sculpture it stands wretched and forlorn but still standing in immovable concrete boots that cut off the circulation (and ones inability to circulate) beyond the confines of a nebulous self detriment.

Kamikaze Decisions, Text Message, The Lone Pair, Feminine Ending, White Feather, The Mundane Plod, The Coward, all use blunt expressionism to usher the viewer into a subject matter of banality and minor turmoil, made explicit. These hand painted text poems plunder the psyche of regret and sadness, like Robinson Crusoe trying to find a way out of his isolation, only to retread his own plodding steps and find frenzied comfort in his own familiarity. While peering round delicate black sculptures, (that seem on the verge of collapse, resting precariously on tiny shelves) we engage with a mixture of profanities and the little burps of trivia and irrelevance that can send us round the bend. Lowe finds personal observation and disjointed memory pins the doubts that dismantle healthy experiences and puncture the thin skin of rational discernment, which act like mental dark implosions and hurdles to well being.

‘People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for sexual desire, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?’
Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake.

For further information or images please contact Martin Rasmussen: +44 (0)20 7729 9888 or: martin@vilmagold.com