Exoskeleton, installation view: Silverlens Galleries, photo Silverlens Galleries. 2021


Exoskeleton, installation view: Silverlens Galleries, photo Silverlens Galleries. 2021


Exoskeleton, installation view: Silverlens Galleries, photo Silverlens Galleries. 2021


Exoskeleton, installation view: Silverlens Galleries, photo Silverlens Galleries. 2021


Exoskeleton, installation view: Silverlens Galleries, photo Silverlens Galleries. 2021


Exoskeleton, installation view: Silverlens Galleries, photo Silverlens Galleries. 2021

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Exoskeleton


Silverlens Galleries is proud to present Exoskeleton, the solo exhibition of the London-based, Filipino
artist Nicole Coson. In this series composed of large-scale monotype prints that diachronically plots
the gradual breakdown of blinds, Coson ruminates on this prosaic architectural solution that
negotiates the disclosure/exposure of private life as well as the extent to which the outside may be
framed and observed, either through a small gap between the slats or their full retreat into the rail.
Invisibility may be calibrated and made tactical; opacity relents to transparency, and vice versa; the
angle of sight is what orders the world.
With the slats individually painted and laid gradually under the press, the blinds transmit their form
onto the cloth—the real made to testify to the illusory representation it forges. Through repeated
pressing, the rhythmically meditative horizontal bands unravel, with the slats breaking away from a
tightly rigorous pattern to an improvisatory mode sparked by the unforeseen tension between
machine, matrix, and medium. Lines buckle, overlap, zigzag. Paint reveals cloth which reveals
ultimately nothing: there is no there there (Gertrude Stein). Sequentiality is harmed beyond repair.
The initial promise of revelation gives way to the rude realization that these works are exoskeletal
extension of the gallery walls in the same way that the building envelope of the house is the
exoskeletal extension of the fragile, vulnerable body—all the more made apparent in the light of the
rampaging global infection. At once a seduction and a disavowal of sight, Exoskeleton offers the
notion of painting as a membrane, as a dislocated window, as an exquisite disruption to the
predictability of vision.