19.10-20.11.2026

Duo exhibition with Anastasia Pavlou and Sebastian Lloyd Rees

“The reader of poems is asked to consider an image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality (…) and in reading applied to life, all passivity disappears if we try to become aware of the creative acts of the poet expressing the world”.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Sebastian and I think about painting often by doing other things. We have discussed many times amongst ourselves that calling oneself a painter is not only a way of stating what one does but, more to the point, how one sees, their position to the world. I started calling myself a painter confidently before feeling confident as a painter because I knew that that was the way that I understood the things and the world around me. A position like that is a canon, something that one accepts less than a choice and more as a fact. Picking up a set of binoculars, yes that is a choice, but then what one makes out of it is painting.

The painting realisation happened for me a few weeks before Sebastian and I opened the first show we did together in Athens, in early July 2021. Five years and a bit have passed since then and our trajectories have felt like a cardiogram, sometimes beeping louder than others but nevertheless always around. The last time we worked together, we were inhabiting space together, working side by side and we showed our paintings in the same manner. We are now both taking the train to go to Paris and show together again, this time by bringing what seems to happen parallel or adjacent to painting, informed by it, next to it, often times concluding it or enriching its argument. Everything has the potential of being a situation and what exists within this situation, informs and shapes the things around it.

While thinking of Sebastian and his work, I read a few phrases that I wrote down in my notes app on my phone, not sure reacting to what exactly and definitely not on the same day. Somehow by choosing to combine these seemingly unconnected thoughts - thoughts about Sebastian’s paintings and thoughts written down while riding different means of public transportation - poetry gets a form; “A projection for the future comes from a reading of the present”, “On a night that one dreams without sleeping”, “With a little help from the poetry of others, The beauty of half remembered things”, “I look at the tree outside of my window and it makes sense, I am looking at the tree outside of my window and it is making sense”.
By Anastasia Pavlou