"It’s been a lonely time, locked away in our apartments, craving color, craving new thoughts, craving intimacy.
Let’s take a cosmic bath together.
I want to lay on the bottom of the sea floor with you. Like brittle stars, let’s be tentacular—and dark, dark purple." - Cecilia Granara to London, 2022
Sapling is thrilled to present Cecilia Granara's solo exhibition and her London debut.
Granara uses painting, drawing, writing, and installation to explore self-fiction, poetry and symbolic iconography. She draws on cultural attitudes to sexuality and bodies, using colour as a vehicle for emotions. For this exhibition, she has created a new body of work that employ iconographic and emotive cues to reach through eyes of the viewer into the heart and the gut.
The title "Brittle Stars" makes reference to nature and ancient symbolism: a sea creature with five spindly legs emerging from a central circular node, itself a symbol of the Ancient Egyptian goddess of the sky, Nut, who bends backwards on her hands and feet to bridge the stars and earth. Like all starfish, a brittle star regenerates limbs when they are lost.
"Cup Spilling (infinite)" (2021) [illustrated] depicts an orange hand tipping yellow paint into space, merging with green. Inspired by David Batchelor's concept of chromophobia, the Western canon's fear of colour for its potential to corrupt or contaminate formal concepts, Granara instead leans into this potential. Lime yellows, oranges, purples and greens break with what academic painters consider proper use, subverting the gendered aspect of classical colour convention: that colour is emotional, and the emotional is female. Cecilia chooses novel hues with desire, joy, and anger in equal measure, all forces necessary to break down walls.
