The Quiet Within

Pontone Gallery introduces an ensemble show for 2025, featuring a roster of international and

home-grown talent, whose practices range across painting, works on paper and sculpture.

These artists share a singular and rigorous dedication to exploring and refining their

particular techniques. This intensity of engagement makes for an arresting sequence of

sumptuous images and objects. Common to all is a sense of tranquil introspection, where

sophisticated content is hermetic, veiled and subject to quiet allusion. These pieces reveal

themselves under an inquisitive and contemplative gaze.

Pontone Gallery welcomes an exciting new artist, Yuki Aruga, whose oil studies of over-

scaled floral motifs unfurl themselves in a virtuoso display of painterly skill. Like their

classical antecedents, these dramatic and sensuous compositions evoke ideas of fecund

growth and romantic decay.

Henry Jabbour uses exuberant colour and agitated texture to make images of intimate

human interludes. His paintings whip up a blend of buttery, swirling, gestural handling that

articulates a constantly shifting state of mood and atmosphere.

Korean artist, Park Jieun works on paper using a traditional method of ink-laden brushwork.

From a distance these pictures appear as abstract exercises in expressive, calligraphic

handling. On closer inspection, however, tiny urban landscapes are revealed. The

contemporary is contained within the traditional.

Cha Jongrye is a Korean sculptor. Birch plywood is bent and moulded into three-

dimensional Platonic forms, generated by exploring and multiplying the fold and the curve.

The resultant pieces are evocative of a multitude of natural structures - both big and small -

from the contours of the earth to the cell structure of an amoeba.

Italian painter, Matteo Massagrande, is a master of perspective. Through his manipulations

of viewpoint, juxtapositions of interior and exterior and dissections of the picture plane he

creates complex studies of architectural spaces that express a compelling sense of place and

associated memory.

Chris Rivers is an expressive handler of the oil medium who builds up layers of liquid

glazes, thick and sticky impasto and fluently-graphic brush marks to make astral skyscapes

that reference the turbulent, shifting voids of space. Small figures of astronauts punctuate the

whirling vortices, summoning up possible tales of lyrical, Sci-Fi fantasy.