Between Mediums. The Convergence of Art at Atticus Art Gallery

In its final and most conceptually daring instalment, CARC LAB/2024: The Alchemy of Media culminates in Between Mediums—a rich and hauntingly cohesive exhibition at Atticus Art Gallery in Bath. Bringing together four formidable talents—Olga Khrapova, Isabelle Moreau, Kai Ueda, and Javier Estévez—this show elegantly dissolves the distinctions between painting, photography, and sculpture, offering a rare synthesis of thought and form.

The gallery, with its blackened walls and immersive scenography, feels almost alchemical in itself—a chamber where materials and meanings transmute before our eyes. Curated with a restrained theatricality, the space encourages slow looking, reflection, and a sense of somatic engagement.

Isabelle Moreau: Sculpting the Vanishing

Positioned between two large-scale paintings, Isabelle Moreau’s sculptural bust appears almost as a relic—half excavated, half imagined. Moreau’s practice begins not in clay or marble, but in the photographic image. She manipulates photographs digitally, distorting facial structures and introducing ghostly aberrations, before translating them into three-dimensional form through casting. The result is neither classical nor futuristic—it is uncannily unfixed.

Her busts, such as the one exhibited here, bear faint features, smeared and unsteady, as though they were solidified mid-disappearance. Painted with pallid tones and adorned with surreal, fabric-like protrusions, the sculpture appears to be in conversation with both the baroque and the post-human. Crucially, the lighting plays an active role: spotlights exaggerate the shadows, and the reflected glow from adjacent artworks brings moments of clarity to otherwise amorphous forms.

What makes Moreau’s work compelling is its philosophical undertone—a study of memory and its inevitable distortion. Her figures do not present the self; they reflect the trauma of its vanishing. Rather than creating monuments to identity, Moreau builds artefacts of disintegration. Each sculpture is a refusal of fixed likeness, offering instead a kind of psychological ruin—one shaped not by the artist’s hand alone, but by the viewer’s own projections.

Moreau does not sculpt figures; she sculpts afterimages. And in this exhibition, her quiet presence becomes a haunting counterpoint to the more overtly gestural or photographic works surrounding it.

Kai Ueda: Painting in the Age of Interference

Kai Ueda’s paintings pulse with a kind of digital unease. At first glance, they resemble abstract expressionism filtered through the visual vocabulary of computer glitches. But closer inspection reveals an intentional paradox: Ueda’s works are deeply painterly—built up through manual layering, dragging, and erasure—yet they vibrate with the ghost of screen-based imagery.

The piece on view in Between Mediums exemplifies this tension. Harsh strokes of fuchsia, white, and black tear through the composition like visual interference, recalling corrupted data streams or paused VHS frames. The painting captures a moment of beautiful degradation—where form begins to appear only as it is being undone. Ueda, trained in both traditional Japanese painting and digital animation, brings a rare fluency to this hybrid language.

What is remarkable here is the refusal of stability. The eye searches for depth, a horizon, a recognisable figure—but the image continuously slips away. Instead, the work becomes an allegory for visual overload in the digital age—where clarity is fleeting, and all perception is mediated through disruption.

In Ueda’s hands, painting becomes a battleground between classical technique and contemporary noise. It is not merely a stylistic fusion, but an existential one: a meditation on how we navigate beauty, loss, and distortion in an age of endless reproduction.

Javier Estévez: Density of the Ephemeral

If Ueda’s paintings channel the logic of the screen, Javier Estévez’s photographic works defy the flatness traditionally associated with the medium. His contribution to the exhibition—a print composed on layered panes of glass—occupies the corner of the gallery like a portal. The image itself is hard to pin down: perhaps a skyline, perhaps a ruin, refracted into violet hues and shattered geometries.

What makes Estévez’s work compelling is its use of depth—not just in the visual sense, but in the material construction of the image. He prints multiple exposures onto translucent surfaces, stacking them with precision, allowing light to pass through and shift the imagery depending on where the viewer stands. It is photography as sculpture—image as architecture.

This particular work shimmers as it fractures. As light bends around it, certain details disappear while others emerge. The familiar becomes strange. In doing so, Estévez reminds us that photography is not a window to the world but a construction of it. His images are dense not because they are cluttered, but because they are layered with time, motion, and multiplicity.

The mirrored spheres on the floor—placed like orbs dropped from another world—extend this spatial logic. They reflect not only the artwork, but the viewer and the room, folding all dimensions into a recursive, immersive surface. As with Khrapova’s paintings and Moreau’s busts, Estévez’s work asks us to confront our own gaze and the instability of the visible.

Olga Khrapova: Figuration at the Edge of Perception

Russian-born and now based in Spain, Olga Khrapova brings a psychologically charged intensity to Between Mediums that is both formally rigorous and emotionally destabilising. Trained in classical draughtsmanship at the Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, Khrapova’s academic roots are apparent—but not in any conventional sense. Her practice actively subverts the clarity and precision of that tradition, replacing it with a visual language of blur, rupture, and painterly ambiguity.

In the works displayed at Atticus, particularly the large-scale figural composition in violet, green, and black, we encounter not likeness but the afterimage of subjectivity. Her figures, spectral and unfinished, emerge and recede within a visual fog, evoking crowds not as physical gatherings but as collective psychic residue. The bodies are often loosely bordered in acidic yellows or chalky whites, forming shifting silhouettes that resist categorisation. These are not portraits—they are traces, apparitions dredged from beneath the surface of memory.

Khrapova’s approach to figuration aligns her with a lineage of psychological painters—from Bacon’s mutilated forms to Dumas’ ink-smeared bodies—yet her work is more atmospheric than anatomical. Her interest lies not in representing flesh, but in suggesting the instability of perception itself. In this, she channels what might be called an archaeology of affect—a process through which emotional residue is unearthed rather than composed. The painting becomes an excavation site, and the figures unearthed are at once fragile, communal, and transient.

Her technique further reinforces this conceptual approach. Khrapova frequently works in oil on aluminium—a choice that dramatically alters the behaviour of the medium. Unlike canvas, aluminium does not absorb paint, allowing for extended manipulation and facilitating her signature optical blurring. This blur is not decorative; it is structural. It becomes a metaphor for trauma, erasure, and memory’s refusal to stabilise. Figures seem to surface from chromatic fog only to dissolve again—neither entirely present nor absent, but suspended in a continuous becoming.

One of the most haunting aspects of her contribution to the exhibition is this exact sense of liminality. The viewer is never quite allowed to “see” the work in full. Instead, Khrapova’s paintings demand attunement, inviting viewers not to read but to feel—to drift through an emotional terrain shaped by light, gesture, and disappearance. Her compositions are charged, dissonant, and immersive. The Mediterranean heat of her palette—cadmium reds, bruised purples, electric greens—adds urgency to the psychological density. Colour, here, does not describe form but destabilises it, subjecting the body to chromatic interference.

In the context of Between Mediums, Khrapova’s work acts as a fulcrum: a point where painting’s historical legacy meets the contemporary desire to obscure, unmake, and rethink visibility itself. Her canvases do not depict the figure; they hold space for its fragmentation. They are psychic weather systems—a choreography of vanishing.

A Threshold Space

The genius of Between Mediums lies in its refusal to resolve. It offers instead a threshold—a space where one might sense the synapses firing between forms, traditions, and temporalities. Every piece is in dialogue not just with its neighbours but with the environment itself. It is a show that asks viewers to move differently, to see across disciplines, to accept the artwork as a verb rather than a noun.

As the final chapter of CARC LAB/2024, this exhibition is both an endpoint and a beginning. It posits hybridity not as a novelty but as a necessity—an ethic of making and seeing suited to our fractured, accelerated age.

Between Mediums doesn’t just challenge how we categorise art—it challenges how we perceive reality. And in doing so, it honours the highest ambition of contemporary art: to remake the world, one glance at a time.

Atticus Art Gallery (11a Queen Street, BA1 1HE, Bath)

For more on CARC LAB’s research and future exhibitions, visit atticusartgallery.co.uk

Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.