Let’s set the scene: it’s early evening, the sun casting a warm, orange glow. There are flowers on the table, fruit and wine, or maybe a cup of tea. This is a space filled with sensuous potential, yet somehow detached, aesthetically pleasing to the point of being almost too perfect. Something darker lingers beneath. Mood Lighting, an exhibition of works by Adrian Kay Wong, Juan de la Rica and Nicholas Bono Kennedy, explores the fatigue of social performance, where seemingly idyllic compositions give way to a sense of longing and otherness.
Paintings by Adrian Kay Wong capture everyday domestic moments in which figures appear at the fringes of the canvas, at home but not quite fully in the scene. In one work, a woman stands at the edge of a table looking towards an absent male figure whom we glimpse only through his shadow on the door. We cannot see their faces, but a tension is felt through the objects – a vase of wilting tulips, a cup and spoon, an orange on a plate – and the golden light that surrounds them. Are we witnessing the aftermath of an argument or a moment of romantic intensity? It seems the scene could tip either way. Elsewhere, we encounter a close-up crop of a woman’s shoulder and back as she sits at a window. Again, her body language is suggestive of something being held back: she is turned towards us, but not completely, her face again out of view, while the painted vase behind her and the setting sun evoke a sense of longing for a different time, place or even self.
A similar sense of detachment is felt in a series of figurative paintings by Juan de la Rica. His subject is the female nude, depicted with classically voluptuous curves, smooth skin and bouncy hair. While these women seem to inhabit familiar roles – in one painting wearing sports socks and flicking a foot coyly into the air – they are distracted, their expressions alternately conveying boredom and melancholy. Across these works, as in an accompanying series of still lifes of flowers and glistening fruit, meaning emerges through the relationship between form, colour and space rather than through a fixed storyline. The compositions resist resolution, inviting the viewer to sit in their ambiguity and find meanings of their own.
A similar pair of socks reappear in a painting by Nicholas Bono Kennedy, in which we glimpse a couple entwined on a sofa behind a table bearing an oversized vase of flowers and untouched plates of food. In this work, as across the exhibition, the view out of the window – here, a nighttime cityscape of New York – draws us out of the scene, suggesting a feeling of restlessness or discontent. In other works, Bono Kennedy explores how subtle or surprising details can drastically alter a mood or imagined narrative. Take, for instance, the depiction of a meal in a conservatory-like space filled with verdant leafy plants, flowers and dappled sunlight. It is every part the perfect picture, like something you might see in an interiors magazine, only there is a horse at the table. Its presence is at once magical and overwhelming, introducing a feeling of excess and claustrophobia. Horses recur in another painting, rearing up out of nowhere into a living room, turning a quiet moment into one filled with potential danger, the sleeping dog on the sofa suggesting another narrative: the hunt. These are works that seduce only to lead us into a much stranger and more uncertain place.
Across the exhibition, we are captivated by the sensuality of the surface – vivid colours, ripe fruit, glowing light – drawn into scenes that feel intimate yet curiously mediated. Desire flickers through these paintings, but it is a self-conscious desire, one that seems to both play into and hesitate under our gaze.
