Into, Over and Underneath, Public Gallery, London, UK

The title of the exhibition, borrowed from a 2021 work by Harminder Judge, gestures towards a common concern for patterns of interconnection, repetition, and visual elasticity that encourage the persistent return of the viewer’s gaze to the painting’s surface. Enacting a defensive camouflage against the autonomy of vision and instantaneous interpretation, these three artists share characteristics that foreground ambiguity over certainty, elusiveness over mimicry, and yet precision in the physiological act of seeing. In this exhibition, the constitutive asymmetries that scaffold what we see and what exists become exceedingly transparent, taking the legibility of painting as a site of contestable ground.

Evian Wenyi Zhang’s paintings emerge from a discrete approach to the harmonious aggregation and rearrangement of visual indexes in an act of practised saccade. Each miniature canvas represents a transient visual fixation point, disentangling what she identifies as “areas of interest” within the visual surface. Her source images are extracted from multi-mediated reference material, such as a screenshot of an alarm clock from a late 80s Austrian film, as in A Visit from Satan (2023). Elemental repetition and the grid reference both the modernist canvas and the digital screen; the composite result is made up of constituent cells that read both organic and architectural, advancing a distinctive pictorial idealism that simultaneously aestheticises the cognitive work performed between the eye and the mind. Zhang’s tabulated output inherently cultivates an aesthetic sensibility, a visual stutter of data accumulation, purposefully oblique yet maintaining a semiotic integrity that subverts the visual prejudice of the exacting gaze in its very uniformity. At its core, Zhang’s work is a study of image making; it is not an exercise in fragmentation or synthesis; rather, it engenders a sophisticated sensorial response to the de-accelerated process of mediated visual information design.