AUFHEBEN
AUFHEBEN
Filippo Antonello Curated by Roxane Hemard Spatial Design by Thomas Brewin 3 June - 5 July
PRESS RELEASE
“Within this body of work, my interest lies in this tipping point: the balance between having so much detail that it dissolves into nothingness and having so little that a subtle presence emerges.”
Kearsey & Gold present Aufheben, the debut solo exhibition by Swiss artist Filippo Antonello. The exhibition takes its name from the Hegelian concept of “aufheben” — a triadic process of negation, preservation, and transformation. Antonello’s body of work explores this very dichotomy between erasure and retention, examining what is lost and what endures in the act of creation.
Using bleach and ink on unconventional canvases such as velvet, denim, and corduroy, Antonello meticulously alters the surface until something new, and often unexpected emerges, reminiscent of exposing film photography. The paintings embrace contradiction — transforming it into a surface where the ephemeral and the permanent collide, where the viewer is simultaneously drawn in and pushed out.
Aufheben was shaped by Antonello’s fascination with material language and the invisible mechanics of perception. The artist describes them as a negotiation between the realistic and the abstract – a loop where representation dissolves into materiality and vice versa. “The viewer eventually reaches a state akin to perceiving white noise—a point where the abundance of detail transforms into an almost intangible visual hum.” Antonello’s surfaces oscillate between states: image and erasure, structure and collapse, melody and rupture. There is no singular resolution, no concluding note. Rather than settling into a fixed form, the materials interact against one another, conjuring fields of vibration where meaning hovers, flickers, and disperses—”the paintings are less about representation than about tuning: the viewer is not positioned in front of the work, but inside its wavelength, caught in the recursive motion of perception and loss.”
Thomas Brewin, an artist whose practice considers contemporary display conventions, was brought in to accentuate Antonello’s philosophy of perception. Brewin reconfigures the gallery architecture to support Antonello’s paintings, conceptually comparable to James McNeill Whistler’s The Peacock Room (1876) — a seminal example of a room realised as a total unit of art. Brewin’s spatial interventions enrich Antonello’s Gesamtkunstwerk (all-embracing) approach and his artistic investigation into Hegel’s “aufheben” theory. These elements together draw the viewer into a corporeal negotiation between space and artwork.
Aufheben is not a display of paintings – it is a system of inquiry, a choreography of making and unmaking. Antonello’s process is “recursive, yet forward-moving” — an apt description for a practice in which materials are continually reencountered, canvases turned and revisited, and gestures repeated not to replicate, but to renew. The works exist not as endpoints, but as provisional moments within a longer dialogue, where every return reshapes the whole. Through its convergence of painting, sculpture, and spatial design, Aufheben invites viewers to pause, to dwell in uncertainty, and to consider the strange and delicate processes by which presence is constructed from absence.
