ORIGIN
2017,Lightstage Gallery, Hong Kong
Orbiting around emotions, Ophelia Jacarini carries out an experimental effort touching feeling of falling down.
ORIGIN is an installation composed of two large size paintings on cotton fabric. Installed on a “U” shaped structure constructed by scaffolding, the painting placed at the bottom is named MOVEMENT.
By its open armed structure the painting is inviting for a walk through, the vibrant acrylic colours of the painted bodies moving in a disjointed choreography surrounds the second large painting. Titled EMOTE, the second painting is hung from the ceiling, acting as a covering piece of the environment.
Presenting a variety of emotions through facial expressions, Ophelia Jacarini takes the focus on feeling of falling. Through EMOTE, emotions can be seen as experienced by a dancer or in totally different circumstances in natural flow of life. Only using watercolour blue during the process of EMOTE, she demonstrates the focal difference between two paintings with her choice of separate colours.
The pairing of the two pieces can be seen in the fact that MOVEMENT disregards the faces of the dancers, while EMOTE evades the bodies but only shows the faces. Concerning what emotions could falling down trigger in a person, overhead positioning of EMOTE drives a slight glimpse of falling accompanied with a discomfort for the ones spending time looking at it.
This work takes place as the first piece where Ophelia Jacarini used blue colour as a representation of intangible notion. She then carried on using blue in her work concerning impalpable. Sentimentally being in consciousness, these concepts live out of systematic explanations but come to life through her practice.
This work further ignited Ophelia Jacarini’s fascination for the unseen in relation to movement.
SUB- CONSCIOUS
Sub-Conscious is a delicate and fragile depiction of capturing elusive behaviour and formed identity. In keeping with her exploration of identity, movement, and notions of purity, Jacarini uses fragile blue pigments on canvas to emulate how filtered everyday subject matter can fade into concealed milieu. The gestural abstraction of her application represents the common distortion of our subconscious, splattered meticulously and strategically across the bound canvas much a like the way we delve in and out of our own mind-space. Serving as an interpretation of the glimpses of our awareness to our state of being, she challenges spectators to question the belief of their consciousness.
The extended series of Sub-Conscious, the triptych Fetus 1, 2, and 3, is a more controlled series of paintings produced by brush using the similar medium across the series. In its examination of the relationship between mother and baby, Fetus explores the idea of the forming identity in the early period of life. In contrast, Fetus challenges the fragility of the sub-consciousness as it takes form through life and body depicted in its more controlled gestural applications of acrylic and pigment.
