Animals as Data

Exhibition of Billy Bagilhole and Omer Even-Paz
at The Square Galley London - 04.11.2017

Curator: Colin Allen 
Writing: Noa Levin 

Bagilhole and Even-Paz crafted together a collection of works that use two distinguished languages. These two languages were developed in different, or even opposite parts of the world--one in the Middle-East and the other in Northern Wales--but they somehow appear to be connected. The works complement each other in shape and colour as well as in many of their recurring themes. But above all, a sense of intimacy and fragility creeps into both works, like a heavy secret that lays there, about to unfold. 

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Bagilhole's paintings are an on-going creation of a personal, visual dialect. Animals, especially the ones that can be found in the Northern-Welsh countryside where Bagilhole grew up, are featured heavily in many of the works. Caricaturist imagery of Native-Americans and Mexicans as well as a young boy seemingly lost in time are also frequent figures in the vocabulary of Baglihole. Many of the themes have infiltrated to the painting through the pictorial works of Bagihole’s late father who himself was a painter. A prominent motiff in Bagilhole paintings is a notion of death and grief. 
This morbid, and even macabre sense is also shared in the works of Omer Even Paz. Even Paz’s sculptures are made using a unique technique that mixes aluminium foil and spray paint. This special materiality allows them to fluctuate between metallic heaviness and paper-lightness. The works usually depict animals with historic and cultural significance--a dove, a fox, a hare--that range from Greek mythology to folk fables and biblical stories. The sculptures also seem to transform with the position of the viewer--from the very figurative depictions of biological structures to lamps of matter and colour.