Common Ground: An exhibition in Folkestone

27 March - 7 April 2025

The Laurent Delaye Gallery is delighted to present

a new exhibition in Folkestone celebrating its longstanding

collaboration with artists and their practice.

PRIVATE VIEW: SATURDAY 29 MARCH, 2-6 PM

64-66 The Old High St , Folkestone, Kent CT20 1RN
The exhibition Common Ground gives a particular visibility to the discipline and philosophy of abstract/concrete art forms. It has been of central interest to the gallery over the years, and many collaborations have come from it. Collaboration is a natural terrain for artists, and in particular for those who experiment in concrete abstraction. The new generation represented in this exhibition has substantially carried the flame in renewing the enduring question of the relationship between scientific cognition and aesthetic perception. They are bringing up to date an understanding that our aptitude to look into structures can also meld with our ability for poetry, imagination and emotions.

Other poles of interest are also part of this carefully curated display and form a conversation with all the other works involved. The artists in this show who are working with more ‘figurative’ forms have all a mischievous streak. After all, the great concrete art precursors of the early last century, with their uncompromising mathematics, were very – very – close to the most troublesome of Dadaists. History renews itself, this time in Folkestone, and presents:

Fabio Almeida -  Paul Atkins -  Kate Beaugié -  Katrina Blannin

Rosalind Davis - Fiona de Bulat -  Drew Edwards

Justin Hibbs -  Caroline List -  Bérénice Mayaux

Jason Oddy -  Cathy Rogers -  Anna Silverton

Bob and Roberta Smith -  Michael Stubbs - Jessica Voorsanger

Jason Oddy
Magnolia Prophylactorium, Odesa, Ukraine, 1999
C-Print
73 x 69 cm; 28 3/4 x 27 3/16 in
with frame 77 x 73 cm; 30 5/16 x 28 3/4 in
urban

Fabio Almeida and Jason Oddy

On the subject of parallels and relationships, the sinuous and stimulating cross-fertilisation between these very different works shown together is endless. Here are a few examples:

The photographs of Jason Oddy, who has been extensively investigating in his work the remnants of modernism in the decay of time, stand in dialogue with Fabio Almeida’s layered paintings of abstract built-up structures in allusions to the ghost heritage of a modernist past. Hence Oddy’s post-soviet Ukrainian sanatorium or the leftovers of Oscar Niemeyer architecture in Algeria, seen in parallel with the impressive vertical horizons of Almeida’s urban landscapes.
photogram

Kate Beaugié and Cathy Rogers

Photography is not always produced by clicking the shutter button, it can be even more elemental – like it was for some of the 19C. pioneers, manipulating the sensitive paper with bare hands, and the result more haphazard.

In this exhibition, two artists experiment in very different ways with light-absorbing material, Kate Beaugié lets light bounce on golden plated cubes or on the surface of water in sharp shadows of non-exposure, Cathy Rogers makes direct photograms of plants on 16 mm strips of films, and both achieve completely unique configurations made from light.
geometry

Justin Hibbs, Katrina Blannin, Caroline List, Rosalind Davis

Playful linear and three-dimensional self-standing geometrical structures

are offered for direct contemplation in the works of Justin Hibbs, Katrina Blannin, Caroline List and Rosalind Davis. The physical quality of the medium highlights the presence of poetic arithmetic. All aspects of perception are at play, from chromatic response to light reflection and absorption through degrees of saturation. Essentially the artists work with inner and outer reception: what we see and what is at work cognitively, on a subliminal level, when we observe in our senses a particular structure.
Artworks
collaborative
Justin Hibbs and Rosalind Davis
Justin Hibbs and Rosalind Davis push this experiment further with a reflective sculpture-object functioning perfectly as a piece of design, a multi-level standing shelf, which becomes an active tool collaboration with other artists, notably here with the porcelains by Anna Silverton and photograph by Kate Beaugié.
curve

Fiona de Bulat and Anna Silverton

Affinities are present in the pursuit of form that reach the purest of lines.

Anna Silverton elaborates the hardest to achieve ultimate simplicity with porcelain, gravity defying lightness and optimum harmony in the lines of a curvature. Fiona de Bulat is looking for the same clarity on paper in lithographs and screenprints, where recognisable elements from nature become the source of intemporal compositions.
arrested motions

Bérénice Mayaux, Michael Stubbs, Jessica Voorsanger

The exploration of abstract forms can take opposite directions and yet have in-depth similarities. They all share a rigorous pursuit of the fulfilment of forms, a readiness to break rules, and compositions in arrested motions.

Bérénice Mayaux, as part of her visual vocabulary, has astrophysics in mind, and the forces at play on a cosmological and molecular level, in curved spacetime and atomic fusion. Michael Stubbs evolves in an enhanced graphic world, where flat elements are superposed in complex alignments overriding and informing each other. Jessica Voorsanger uses found textiles to elaborate compositions that first play on the abstract quality of the material itself before bringing multiple samples to a configuration of rhythms and colours.
figure

Paul Atkins and Drew Edwards

The misleading duality abstract/figurative is one of the curses that afflict the appreciation of art, as if it was an obvious either/or. In this show, two practitioners are here to contradict this spurious assumption.

Paul Atkins draws imaginary beings, but these are more like phantasmic spirits revealed from his (or our) mind than images of living creatures, much as a hardened abstractionist would let them emerge. Drew Edwards carves in uncarvable boulders of flint to bring forth evocations of life. He submits himself to the constraints of this mysterious stone that was once liquid, then turned into the hardest yet most brittle of materials. His pursuit is the figure that emerge from alien laws of nature.
Artworks
magic
Bob and Roberta Smith
The exhibition concludes with Bob and Roberta Smith, an artist well versed in visual poetry, outsider art, public art, storytelling and performance, whose work conducts all these different registers like a magician enthralling his audience, with irony, political wit and a firework of colours. A quite logical conclusion to it all.

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