Arabella Hope is a young painter whose subject matter are interior, intimate spaces in the domestic environments, specifically bathrooms. She shows us these spaces charged with personal emotion through memory, color, texture and shape.
Bathrooms for many seem mundane, but for some these sanctuaries are one of the few places where one can rest alone with one’s thoughts. These are important spaces for meditation and for cleansing ourselves in many levels: spiritually, emotionally and physically.

The work of young Portuguese artist Marco Pires is linked to cartography and maps, instruments we use to locate ourselves in a place and our articulation of distances, voids, volumes and routes in space. These Maps appear to be anonymous cities, faceless towns silently overlapping giving us a disorientating joy.

As I turned into the next room, following the work of Los Carpinteros in the Psycho Buildings Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I could not hold back the surprise: the beauty of a tiny village, all lit-up in a dark room was like looking at a Christmas tree when you are five years old. I got so overwhelmed I actually cried. It was this nostalgic feeling of playing with doll-houses that got to me most, especially when I pictured fifty-something year-old Rachel Whiteread constructing these tiny houses with bits and pieces of materials she has been collecting all of her life.

As one looks closer into the houses, the slow unveiling of an eerie fact becomes evident. There is nobody inhabiting this village, there is no furniture inside the houses too. All the rooms of the village are empty and all contents have been taken – the only reminder of coziness of these homes are depicted by the decorative elements of each house, all individual and unique: the wallpaper, the texture of the floors and the patterns of the carpet and curtains. All these the materials Whiteread has collected in her life as they carry this memory of place, like the first memories we have being those of the pattern of the bedsheets of our first bed or the color of the wallpaper in our rooms.

This is Paul Noble’s drawing of Nobson Newtown, a fictional city created by three dimensional letters (Nobfont): is a meticulous piece of work which took 8 years to make. I can not read  the text, but the ruins and the spatial configuration of this city have a dreamlike quality that is captures my attention and speaks to me loudly.  It is the idea of this city serving as self portrait that I find most fascinating: buildings in dreams are supposed to be symbols of ourselves – minds and bodies-. It is amazing to see this idea developed in an ‘urban scale’, the details of the city erroded by time, ancient and deserted after a bombing.

It was a really great exhibit: the painter, a quiet danish man in the mid 1800′s painted the interiors of his apartment in Copenhagen over and over again. He focused his attention on the empty rooms of his home, devoid any clutter or decoration. He arranged the wooden furniture, the doors of his apartment and painted these almost always empty.

In some of his paintings his wife is depicted from behind or playing the piano. Still, his works convey an overwhelming stillness and silence, the palette of colours always subdued, delicate and cold. His observations and studies of light are wonderfully rendered and the spatial descriptions beguiling in a way I have never seen before. I greatly recommend this exhibition, or at least looking him up in a bookstore or the web, I assure you will be surprised to find these pictures of empty rooms full of meaning and poetry.

A quick sketch of boombox and Brooklyn:

And this!