I hope you can join us tonight for the opening of Jochem Mestriner at the gallery for his first exhibition, The Daylight Sick. The opening goes from 5-8pm and the exhibition will remain on view until July 12th.
Jochem Mestriner makes paintings that seduce and poison in equal measure. Working in extended sessions, he builds surfaces through layers of pigment, solvent, and gestural residue. These materials are as chemically volatile as they are visually compelling. The canvas becomes a site of slow intoxication: what attracts the eye is also what unsettles it.
This double logic borrows from the Drosera, the sundew plant that produces a luminous, sweet-scented dew to lure insects onto its leaves, where they are trapped and digested. Mestriner’s paintings operate along this same logic. The surface attracts you with colour, sheen, and the residue of accumulated gestures buried beneath what is visible. But the invitation is not entirely safe. The painting not only produces desire, it consumes it.
Materiality is central to this project. The sheen of certain pigments, the residue left by a solvent-wiped surface, or the ghost of a former composition buried beneath new layers are not incidental qualities. They are the primary means by which the paintings perform their attraction. Rooted in the traditions of Still life and genre painting, informed by literature, philosophy, art history and biology, Mestriner’s work operates at the threshold between beauty and harm, between the living and the preserved. His paintings do not illustrate this condition; they enact it.
Do not hesitate to reach out if you want to know more about the works in the show.
