Artistellar Gallery is pleased to announce Thinking of You, Eli Kauffman’s first UK solo show comprising their most recent paintings. The exhibition comes together to investigate the diverse relationships among Eli’s subject matters. The subjects depicted inhabit the canvas and the artist’s reality and inform the audience’s responsiveness - they are evocative and seemingly ordinary snapshots. Kaufmann’s figurative paintings interlace an attentive eye on society with a desire to represent what it is, implicitly and explicitly.
Thinking of You features small and medium-scale paintings, highly expressive and filled with hinted meanings, often allowing for ambiguity and prompting the viewer to develop a personal story. Eli Kauffman creates mostly from interpretations of stills taken from movies, episodes, and daily inspiration. All that exists in their practice has a timeline, yet, the viewer is welcome to play around while wandering Artistellar’s gallery space, rearranging the linearity of time and exploring different purposes of given events. The show presents the audience with a broader metaphor for life, where reality is never univocal but subjective - as truth is often a case of perception.
Kauffman’s works aim to depict a tangible realm as if a mirror to daily life occurrences, where one can reflect on the deeper connotations. References to reality are scattered around the show, with screen devices on and tattoos well visible, as in Have You Seen This and Hold Still.
“I would want to think of myself as not always on my phone, but I am, like most everyone in our society, and I cannot refrain from representing this.”
However, phones, just like tattoos, cars and billiard tables are not there to make a statement as one could think - Eli urges to make their work feel grounded in what we experience in our routine. It is about making their oeuvre relatable.
In other works, the close-up on a gesture or facial expression leaves space for the viewer to decipher the implied relations to the context. Besides, there is an underlying rumination on what it feels like to mature which ties with each artwork on display.
The artist engages with a set colour palette with a double interpretation. The colours often refer to the moment of the day in which the scene is set - whether it be daytime, soft and daydreaming, or nighttime, when the majority of private affairs take place. Yet, the colours selected also exude an inner state of being. The blue lights are soft and comforting, the shades of pink are vibrant, and yellow comes off as the embodiment of pure light.
Thinking of You, at last is a call for intimacy and closeness, but also distance, which is the prerequisite to focus on the different levels of beauty, intimacy, and mystery embedded in the everyday.
Born in Salt Lake City and living in Providence, Rhode Island, Eli Kaufmann (b.1998) joined Matt Kolansky artists collective “Art Kollective" last year. Eli received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Despite enjoying all sorts of fine arts, Eli considers painting as the proper medium to express their emotionally charged thoughts and give life to their intrinsic world.
Words by Bianca Spaggiari