Gilder Alice Cescatti's silver leaf paintings feature in Whitchurch show
A NEW exhibition has opened at Whitchurch-on-Thames Modern Artists Gallery, featuring paintings by Alice Cescatti and Benjamin Cockett. Once again, director Peggy Brodie’s eye for exciting contemporary work has provided a visual treat for the festive season.
It’s always a pleasure to see Alice Cescatti’s latest work. Alice grew up and studied fine arts in New Zealand. She moved to London to study interior design, along with a four-year apprenticeship restoring gilded and painted furniture, and became a much demanded freelance gilder in Europe.
Her unique technique involves a rarely seen water-gilding process with which she has mastered different ways of describing light.
It is more complex than oil gilding, involving building up many layers of sanded gesso and clay on wooden panels. This is followed by floating individual silver or gold leaves on to the clay surface using a specialist method dating back to Egyptian tomb paintings and reliefs from the 23rd century BC, some of the earliest evidence of gold being beaten into leaf. The gold or silver leaf surface is then hand burnished with an agate stone to enhance the quality of the metal as a light source.
Alice Cescatti’s acid etched silver leaf paintings can be viewed at the Modern Artists Gallery alongside work by Benjamin Cockett, who studied at The Slade and Camberwell Schools of Art and in Germany.
Ben says: “I believe myself to be a modern painter, utilising the technological advances of my time to create a thoroughly organic painting, reigniting the romantic tradition. I wish to paint in light, colour and texture, through translucency, through the matrix that reflects our time; both fragmented and multi-dimensional.”
The space is also shared by work by two sculptors – Sasha Constable, daughter of renowned artist the late Richard Constable and great great great granddaughter of landscape artist John Constable, and Wendy Freestone, a new artist to the gallery, who was joint Royal Arts Prize winner with Alice Cescatti in 2018 and works from her studio in Oxfordshire, where she specialises in figurative bronze sculpture.
Sacha started carving the new series of sculptures that forms the core of this exhibition in mid-March. “The lockdown was looming. I wanted to translate all the feelings the nascent pandemic provoked into a more physical and visual form. The work is predominantly figurative, even when pursuing different themes or abstractions the sculptures are imbued with connotations of a figurative element.”
Her sculpture has combined fragments of the body with simple architectural features.
The exhibition continues until January 31.
Modern Artists Gallery is in Whitchurch on Thames High Street, on the B471.
