THIS FLOATING HOUR
Claudio Coltorti, Katelyn Eichwald, 
Gal Schindler, Ben Walker

Elsa Meunier gallery and Mathilde Le Coz gallery are pleased to present together the collective exhibition entitled This Floating Hour. The exhibition brings together the work of two artists based in England: Ben Walker, British, and Gal Schindler, Israeli with that of American artist Katelyn Eichwald and Italian painter Claudio Coltorti, based in Greece.

Respectively based in Kent County, London, Chicago and Athens, the painters of the exhibition free themselves from reality and narrative to restore with a brush the perceptual residues of the images and emotions that pass through them. The scenes, barely outlined, are devoid of spatiotemporal markers and stripped of details: some characters, sometimes objects, seem to appear or disappear from the pictorial surface - the spectators' attention is focused on an atmosphere, a wave of colour, a sensation. Ben Walker, Katelyn Eichwald, Gal Schindler and Claudio Coltorti paint with successive layers of pigments, images which sediment and permeate the fabric of their canvases, images that are both intimate and anonymous - they emerge like memories too long forgotten.

In Gal Schlinder's work, a silhouette, a sinuous, curving figure-creature, emerges from the multiple layers of colour. The lines of a body intermingle with those of an equally undulating head of hair: only one figure emerges, as if floating on the coloured surface, removed from a background from which it stands out. Shells frequently accompany these female creatures, suggesting the aquatic world from which they come. For the exhibition, Gal Schindler presents a small-format painting in which these symbolic elements, usually relegated to the corners of the canvas, become the main subject, this time taking centre stage. Katelyn Eichwald also proceeds by retrenchment. Often taking film scenes as a reference, the artist chooses to extract a precise moment or object that captures her attention. For example, the artist samples, isolates from its original context and anchors his subject in the fibres of his canvas. Ben Walker, too, draws on found images - old children's illustrations - to compose his paintings. Decontextualised, reduced to the essential and condensed, these visuals allow the spectators' attention to be focused on subjects without history, not absolutely identifiable. Inevitably, they have no other choice than to extract from their memory, by recollection, by association of ideas or memories, the meaning of what they are looking at.

​

Claudio Coltorti like Ben Walker imbue their works with a vaporous and diffuse reality. An evanescent emotion spreads like a coloured mist from which melted and vague figures emerge. The background and the surface merge, sometimes revealing only the line of a landscape for Ben Walker or immense hands topped with black hair for Claudio Coltorti. While the dreamlike landscapes of blues and greens of one envelop a certain nostalgia, dreams put under the magnifying glass of the other spread out in a blur of warm colours. The colours become vectors of dense but outlined emotions, which take shape behind the viewers’ eyes.

​

For each of these four painters, reality, surfaced and troubled, is cut off, diffused - always nostalgic. Ben Walker, Katelyn Eichwald, Gal Schindler and Claudio Coltorti experience viewers with reminiscences created by their floating images. This Floating Hour unveils this prodigious moment when evocation and memory are embodied - the artists show us the reminiscence in its vulnerable subtlety.