At Wood's Edge

T1+2 Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of London-based, Italian artist Seboo Migone. Migone has developed an artistic practice mostly devoted to painting and charcoal drawing.

Somewhere between figuration and abstraction, hope and despair, dreaminess and nightmare, the artist’s works are imbued with contrasting bright and dark tones applied onto surfaces with the expressive physicality of the artist’s gesture. His works evoke possibilities of meaning strongly related to unsettling landscapes where uncanny creatures emerge (such as animals, hunters, masked faces, heads), whose delineation is achieved solely through the contrast of colours and shades. These spectral presences, thus lacking a clear individuation, seem to merge with the landscape, which is paradoxically familiar to both the viewer’s childhood fantasies and fears. Deeply psychological, Migone’s paintings and drawings disturb the viewer for their uneasiness, despite their apparent fairy tale atmosphere. Therefore challenging, these works are impregnated with the obscurity and cheerfulness of nature and human condition – effect which is attained through a physically and emotionally demanding exploration of colour, contrast and texture.

In At Wood's Edge Migone brings together the polarities of his practice by presenting both large-scale colourful paintings and medium- and small-scale black and white charcoal drawings, which, though seeming to be part of opposing worlds, are in fact different sides of the same emotional landscape – that of dream in the verge of becoming nightmare, human in the imminence of turning into animal, adulthood (perhaps, in Migone’s case, fatherhood) paying homage to childhood. Despite the disparate use of colour, scale and media, both the paintings and drawings share these same ambiguities, for even when Migone depicts calmly colourful creatures, he is at the same time able to procure in the viewer the restlessness of the strangely familiar or Freudian uncanny.

In a certain sense Migone’s practice recalls that of the early twentieth-century French Fauves in the use of colour and dis-figuration, and the German Expressionists in the psychological density and the longing for the ‘paradise lost’ or ‘temps perdu’ of anarchic, free and instinctive childhood and nature in opposition to the strict hierarchies of bourgeois urban society. Also, one could think of Surrealist influences namely in the exploration of the dream, the disturbing depiction of the eye, and the acknowledged randomness of the merging colours recalling automatic writing. Migone considers Kandinsky’s work, between figuration and abstraction, as one of his main sources of inspiration as well.

However, the artist retrieves these legacies in his own very unique and personal way, inviting the viewer into a fantastic and phantasmatic world – 'at wood's edge’ – where boundaries symbolically collapse in the very blending of colours and smudging of charcoal.

Installation views of At Wood's Edge: