Uri Aran Eggs For Breakfast and Bird In A Blanket

Uri Aran’s practice encompasses a wide range of media and subject matter, including video, sculpture, painting, drawing, and assemblage. Throughout his practice, Aran constructs a language of indeterminate signifiers in an ongoing pursuit of graphic and linguistic systems – challenging these systems to both the point of disintegration and  allusion to an implicit, if indefinable logic. 

Aran’s work often includes ephemera assembled from everyday life and art historical sources, interwoven with note like intimations and intuitive markings. His approach is inquisitive, playing with both material and abstract elements to conjure visual dialogue, to reveal covert semiotics at play in the production of meaning and the elasticity of narrative. “The discord of meaning in language is something I’m interested in”, he has explained. “I don’t know if it’s because English is not my mother tongue; I see a delay of meaning. I see things as mediated—almost everything is quoted.” 

The body of work in this exhibition, comprises a group of drawings and paintings, that develop upon Aran’s ongoing exploration of image making. Diverse materials are applied with homogeneity, resulting in richly textured graphic cohesion of form and content. Variously combining oil pastel, graphite, coloured pencil, acrylic, digital transfer and bronze, the works’ formal elements invoke an intriguing array of scenographies. In each, fragments of abstract motifs, animal and anthropomorphic forms, handwritten notations and readymade imagery, suggest a broader narrative impulse. 

Aran has compared the works to single letters, that together might be arranged, re-arranged and separated to create new words or stanzas. Or, the experience of reading a comic strip, with each bearing a self-contained expression of meaning, and collectively forming a narrative rhythm. The drawings are populated by protagonists that slip in and out of view, invoking impish tensions and exchanges. Animal-like and human motifs inhabit the spaces, alternately as caricatures recalling student textbook sketches, or as indeterminate dream-like creatures of automatist drawings. Elsewhere, geometric structures evoke thresholds or theatrical settings, staging a scene-within-a-scene. Throughout, the process of image making is articulated and laid bare – in places forms are crossed out – describing a shifting topography of signifiers; drawing into question modes of seeing and interpretation.