Sending
WHAT
‘Like sending my love’, said the American artist when asked about what he meant by the exhibition’s title. Smears, caked-up textures and bursts of colour can be read or interpreted as words, parts of a message on the brink of legibility. Lewis’s art can be read or interpreted as words, but border on the line of illegibility. He uses a specific type of canvas that absorbs everything that he gives it and resists erasure, creating an art that requires order in its process but is chaotic and all-encompassing in its nature.
WHY
Lewis is unique in his use of cheap materials, which reveals the urgency in his practice and his lack of desire to focus solely on art with historical heritage. This new series of works exposes human brutality and a universal, familiar feeling of violence that the artist fully embraces and satiates. Each one of Lewis’s paintings is an act of love towards the self and the multitude, a cryptic visual message of self-acceptance and reassurance.