Twilight Contemporary is thrilled to announce ‘Damp,’ the debut solo exhibition of London-based artist Thomas Mead. Inspired by the act of looking back and a childhood obsession with miniatures, Mead examines the existential weight of what is missing by turning a feeling of emptiness into a palpable reality.
Across the exhibition you will notice a push and pull between laughter and melancholy. Mead’s use of nostalgic youthful symbols (a rubber duck, a toy figurine) throughout the work is playful, but quickly you will experience a melancholic cloud drift across the exhibition. Working through the lens of working class adulthood, Mead has spoken of the difficulty of being a young adult today. In the past he has spoken of a generation of ‘stunted adults’ where the young are more often than not unable to do things expected of them as an adult like own a home or start a family. With this in mind there is a melancholic stillness and an existential reflection on life in his work. Mead manufactures a profound emotional state in his subjects and creates scenes where figures yearn for something unachievable.
Mead’s process in some ways goes against common sense. He quickly builds rough constructed cardboard sets to then painstakingly reproduce them into beautifully accurate and realistic paintings. In the tradition of existentialism, this suggests a real acceptance of the absurd. In this acceptance there is an embrace of the idea life can be cold and lonely, where the universe doesn't quite make sense. This, coupled with the isolation of what should be playful or comic figures or scenes only adds to the weight and ambiguity of the exhibition.
In the basement of Twilight Contemporary, Thomas Mead has constructed a world that is ‘Damp.’ The cardboard works as a pathetic fallacy, fragile and wet like the mood young adults have today, while Mead’s paintings visualise and capture an unusual, strange, almost indescribable feeling of living that experience.
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