Artists | Simon Linington, Charlotte Walentin

Curator | Dori Deng

Date | Oct 11 to Nov 30, 2024

Room 815, 33 Sichuan Middle Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai

Material transformation is a profound scientific process that marks the beginning of changes. Life began on our planet Earth from the moment when water transitioned from a solid icy state to liquid form. When the materials for art started to transition, there were heightened forms of changes happening far beyond a new shape, a new vision—a different way of seeing and sensing.

The two artists, Charlotte Walentin and Simon Linington, make gestures that challenge our perceptual way of understanding painting. They extend beyond the convention of either color or surface, defining gravitational structure. Charlotte Walentin, a Swedish artist, uses expansive colored tinted fabric to form folded structures that respond to architectural space. The British artist Simon Linington, inspired by the sand bottle souvenirs from his beloved island hometown, the Isle of Wight, fills painting pigments into tubes or vitrines, creating sculptures that evoke the personal memory of a place and time. Despite their differing generations and unique cultural backgrounds, both artists transform the traditional materials for two-dimensional paintings into three-dimensional sculptural forms, offering fresh perspectives on color and surface in painting through their unique lenses. By dealing with the folding of vast color surfaces or sculpting structures with dry painting pigment, the two artists converge in their materiality and conceptual approaches in this exhibition, transcending their geological and generational influences.

Fold (2024), a pair of wall-size fabric installations, visually opens the exhibition. Two large tinted surfaces set the background rhythm of the exhibition room; they are immersive, soft yet structural. Charlotte Walentin’s artworks deal with colour reading as well as structural understanding. The two actions in the process—tinting and folding—reflect both the artist’s poetic sensitivity and process-driven logical thinking. Next to the tinted surfaces is Blue (2024), a six-meter-long tinted fabric folded repeatedly to form a casually hung wall sculpture. The artwork is precisely formed by repeated actions of folding; the final form expresses pure senses of material drape and its weight. A transition from colour surface to sculpture arrives at gravity.

Turn to the other side of the exhibition room, where the pigment sculpture Summer In My Belly (2024) by Simon Linington is paired with one of Walentin’s Hiatus (2024), a framed piece of pleated fabric. Linington’s sculptures are in slender and minimal forms, often in round tubes or rectangular shapes. Within the pristine glass tube, colour pigment is distinctly layered and pressed, creating a sense of material contraction through colour reading. This air-tight volume of colours rhythmically echoes the pleated drape of Hiatus. Both artworks are made precisely in their small scale through the two artists’ carefully controlled actions of pressing and folding. Linington’s use of colours acts as the counterpoints in the exhibition next to Walentin’s mesmerising fields of colours. Whilst Linington’s pigments are logically decided and mixed before the filling process to form the sculpture, Walentin’s tinting and colour dye treatments on fabric are conducted intuitively. The pair of tube and vitrine sculptures Shadows Still With Us (2024) and Moon Above Our Light (2024) by Linington are the finale of the exhibition. Their distinctive lemon yellow, inky black, and baby blue colour pellets set the rhythm with sharp tones. The clean line and even division of the colours express such clarity in the artist’s interpretation of colours, but romanticism peaks out from the artwork titles, showing the layer of sentiment undertone from Linington’s island spirit.

Both artists are from different generations and cultural backgrounds, but they share the same approaches in reading colours, in transforming the two-dimensional expression into spatial constructs, and in translating their intuition and emotion with visual clarity. Walentin and Linington’s art practices redefined the boundaries of materiality reading. Transformation is a journey, it is also a decision of choice.

About the Curator

Dori Deng is a multifaceted creative, focus in time-based art practice but not limited in the forms of expression. Known as an artist who works with light as the medium, Deng also extended her practice in curate for time-based media. Her dedication to creating lightwork is presented through the forms of light installations, sculptures, and large-scale scenography in modern operas. In recent years, her interest in time-based medium has broadened to curated exhibitions with a focus on process-let artworks. After decade of in-depth experience in art making and production, she subsequently directed Francis Gallery at-large for UK & US global market. Deng continues to expand her vision in time-based media through numerous independent art and curatorial projects, as well as presenting exhibitions and art programme through her new gallery platform. Her latest curatorial projects including duo exhibition by Swedish artist Charlotte Walentin’s textile installation & British artist Simon Linington’s pigment sculptures at Gallery OM in Shanghai, China; solo exhibitions by Italian sculptor & painter Giorgio Petracci, British textile artist Fiona Curran, and Swedish watercolour painter Ylva Carlgren at Space of Time Gallery in Beijing.

About the Artists

Charlotte Walentin (b. 1965) is based in Malmö, Sweden. After receiving her MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 1990, she creates objects that oscillate in between painting and sculpture, item and body, the artificial and the organic, deriving from the characteristics of the material and its presence in the room. The materiality is essential in Walentin’s artistic practice, it sets the context and the logic to the works. She is especially interested in the textile matter, as a material both highly charged and complex in terms of art, craft and as a cultural product, with a reference to the body and the skin as well as the obvious connection to painting.

Simon Linington (b.1983) is a contemporary artist from the Isle of Wight, UK. He has a BA (Hons) in Sculpture from Chelsea University of the Arts, London. In 2010 he was awarded the Emerging Artists Bursary Award by the Royal Society of Sculptors and exhibits internationally. Inspired by the island sand bottle souvenirs that its history traced back to the Victorian time, Linington reinterpret this culture influence with adaptation of using painting pigment to “bottle fill” into sculptures. His unique approach of materiality and the island culture have brought him to the opportunities to create site-specific sculptures around the world. From the City of London to Mexico, São Paulo, and Netherland, his own souvenir to the specific memory and places.