Sea Foam Shame Carlotta Bailly-Borg

Carlotta Bailly-Borg`s paintings are populated by a rotating cast of decadently sinuous figures who weave and curl about each other freed from gravity or restrictions of anatomy. They are driven by desires, willing themselves to life from half-timbered fragments, and sometimes anxiously unsure of how they fit into the pictorial plane. Many of the works in Sea Foam Shame are compressed into the dimensions of the frame or smaller sub-divisions, into which their long limbs fold and push. Her lyrical line conveys a ceaseless energy and serpentine movement; Frustrated by boundaries they fold in on themselves, like a foam-topped wave clashing with a sea wall to curl back into the arms of the ocean.

The exhibition’s enigmatic title is a direct quotation of nirvana’s ‘all apologies’, whose lyric repetitions beautifully replicate the motion of the sea. the song was made legendary in their unplugged set for mtv, where cobain strummed mournfully, apologising to us all for his outsider fragility, just one year before his untimely death. There is a corresponding elegiac poetics to many of these works, in their hazy distance and appeal to be summoned from an obscured realm, coalescing as they draw nearer, but always threatening to dissolve.

Bailly-Borg was drawn to the motif of foam as the product of waters’ agitation, and as an indeterminate substance that is somewhere between liquid, solid, and air. A foam-flecked unending wash is felt in the compositional flow of her figures, who swirl in a vortex of rapid movement and ceaseless reformation. This directly relates to Bailly-Borg’s process of making images as cycles and series, and absorbing art historical references.

text by Natasha Hoare

 

Opening reception         04/03/2025           6-8 PM

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