Songs of Innocence and Experience

A lyrical, vibrant use of color is the link that bonds the artistic practices of Dannielle Hodson (1980), Dina Jin Bae(1988), Ana Monsó (1998), Imi Williams (1999), and Charlotte Worthington (1957), united by their experience at the Royal College of Art in London in 2024. Following Kandinsky's lesson, their pictorial approaches carry significant value in attempting to express the spiritual realm through artistic practice. The leitmotif of their color palettes emerges in their vitality and their magmatic appearance, and in their profound communicative power. Color is used as an autonomous and vibrant force, drawing from what one has lived to synesthetically express the ineffability of thought. Furthermore, it is color itself to confer the exhibited works a final look of purity, an effect we could define as "innocence" in the definition given by William Blake. This statement, coined by the renowned English poet, refers to a state of sweetened harmony, evoking the apparent naive beauty of childhood memories.

Blake was the poet of imagination and visions, yet capable of full awareness of his present, even when it seemed to generate apparent contradictions. In his famous poem The Tyger, Blake questions whether the same entity could have created both the lamb and the tiger, animals so antithetically characterized as to prompt reflection on whether they could truly be products of a single, unified nature. Thus, Blake opens up in his poetics to the possibility of coexistence and a meaning-generating interplay between seemingly irreconcilable elements. Hence, it becomes possible for color also to be innocent, in the sense of being capable of synthesizing a vibration of the soul even when its essence is tied to the painful weight of lived experiences.

Among these five artists, there is a specific interest in exploring the thorny theme of care. This theme is unraveled as an attentiveness to the depths of one's own soul and feelings, in a constant, restless investigation of personal intimacy and domestic baggage. It is this latter element in particular that Charlotte Worthington explores in her work, revealing the unspoken, contradictory nature of the spaces we call home, oscillating between what should be reassuring and familiar and what instead becomes a dissonant, disturbing element. In her works, which carry the legacy of a life spent between animation and television, padding and cutting balance each other on the canvas in a narrative that is torn between vibrant tones and somber undertones, also incorporating metallic elements that cast oblique shadows on the delicate silk.

Representation, both in Worthington's and in Dannielle Hodson’s textiles, is always incomplete and undefined. The depiction of the human figure flirts with abstraction, yet this abstraction then turns into a physical sensation of attraction and dismay. Hands, feet, and faces are rehashed and led to a state of primal sketch and tension, populating Hodson's work with dreamlike and theatrical imagery, sometimes unsettling. Incapable of assuming a definitive form, her works oscillate in a motion of creative instability, making the truth of the painting nothing more than a well-crafted lie.

The brush exclusively becomes an instrument of expression of pain in the case of Ana Monsó, for whom the aforementioned pain is always incomplete, incapable of having a beginning or an end, and in a constant state of fluctuating variation. Her strokes, often sketchy, mutilated, and fragmented, refer to an attempt to unveil her identity, a process that never sees completion and instead gazes directly into the depths of human fragility.

On the other hand, the earthy textures created by Dina Jin Bae, using sponges, silicone bellows, and makeup brushes, resemble a second skin, dabbing and illuminating the canvas with expired makeup products. The artist, with a background in the Korean beauty industry, often pairs these cosmetics with wax, a material historically used to represent the human body already since the ancient tradition of anatomical wax. Jin Bae reflects on the dichotomy between the true self and what one chooses to display through the small daily rituals we rely on to shield ourselves from that unattainable standard we call beauty.

Imi Williams seems, finally, to achieve the effect of exposing the scars of the canvas through progressive erasures and overlaps of colors and materials, creating veils of varying opacity and each time bringing to life an alternate imaginary space, built on the ruin of such layering.

Faded figuration and substantial abstraction chase each other, assuming the shape of an imperfect circle, where the evanescence of memory remains the only possible truth. In the works of all five artists, the act of remembering is a chaotic and bubbling matter, aspiring to recognition and its own space. Artistic practice thus responds to the need to give form to that sensation of the ungraspable, tracing a guiding path to look into one's interiority without being consumed by it.

In John Dewey's words, aesthetic experience condenses into the ability to make sensation, emotion, and thought a unified coagulum, a synesthesia capable of touching the strings of the soul. In the sense suggested by Blake, on the other hand, the term "experience" is used to refer to the confrontation with reality and the shattering of the illusions of innocence, and to a transformative and interactive dimension dictated by negotiating, not always peacefully, with the external environment. In a reinterpretation of the dual vision of the world given by the English poet, balancing between innocence and experience, the trigger—always deeply personal—of each of these artists' poetics becomes witness to how the cathartic form assumed by the finished work is nothing but the superficial layer of an underlying bubbling that embodies energy capable of transforming from self-destructive to creative.

Experience and innocence can coexist and become the two poles within which the works on display are stitched together, revealing all the power that, according to writer Orhan Pamuk, innocent objects possess: the evocative and physical power of memory, evanescent yet deeply rooted in what is experienced.