Art exhibition: ‘Palatable’ by Solange Leon ** 5-30 Apr 2014 ** Naked Eye Gallery
‘Pheasants II’ by Solange Leon
In her first solo show at Naked Eye, Leon presents her work exploring the philosophy of food and consumption. She focuses largely upon aesthetically beautiful game animals, depicting her subjects with a keen sense of the conflict between what is the visually present creature and the unrecognizable product that is eventually consumed.
She is concerned with the detachment from what we consume and the removed participation in its metamorphose from animal to manufactured food product – whilst juxtaposing this process with the intricate beauty of her work. She enquires into the beauty and status of food as a commodity and its significance.
Leon’s work resonates with sense of purposive fascination. She offers the inevitability of human mortality in her animal subjects, the irony of the consumer and the consumed. The enquiry of her work looks inquisitively at the circularity of food and the food chain. A nod to Shere Khan places a bare human figure firmly within the context of her study. It is not without humour that she touches upon the inelegance of the observation.
Leon is a meticulous artist – an absolute insistence to respect the subjects of her portraits compels the avid detail to her work – which renders it all the more poignant. Leon immortalizes her subjects in her study of their mortality purposive to human consumption.
‘I wanted to show how beautiful the food is as an animal – alive and dead – and question our detachment from that awareness.’
Leon studied architecture at the Architecture and Design School of the Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso in Chile and Architecture at the University of Brighton. She is the director and founder of Artichoke Artgroup, and is an experienced art teacher, teaching both children and adults.
Exhibition runs from Saturday 5th April – Wednesday 30th April 10am-6pm, Sundays 12pm-4pm. Gallery closed Tuesdays.
Naked Eye Gallery, 5 Farm Mews, Farm Road, Hove, BN3 1GHvia Upcoming Events.
Sussex ArtBeat 