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"Eat the Skin"
Exhibition
Exhibition
“I have consumed and I have been consumed,” writes Venn Miles. His first exhibition with OIGÅLL PROJECTS, Just Eat the Skin, is a visceral invitation into the volatility of intimacy, how desire marks the body and memory until both are warped beyond recognition.
Working in oil and charcoal, Miles rejects the idealised nude and instead renders the lived body: the dense foliage of hair, the hollow of a throat, the stamping of a foot. In his paintings, flesh is not smooth or obedient but raw, contradictory, and unstable. Limbs multiply, faces blur, torsos collapse and reform, figures caught between tenderness and violation, beauty and grotesque.
The works pulse with memory as both subject and method. Desire refracted across time produces afterimages that are sometimes romanticised, sometimes distorted, always charged. Each fragment of the body carries its own intensity, recalling the surrealist tradition where a part is invested with the weight of the whole.
Miles’ canvases oscillate between table and prey: paintings that seem both to offer themselves and to devour. In them, intimacy is never tidy. To be fully known is to be fully exposed to linger in the memory, in the body, in the dangerous space between holding on and letting go.
A series of Small paintings.
Exhibition
Exhibition
Ben Aitken paints like a collector of contradictions: banal and grotesque, comic and unbearable, ordinary and utterly unreal. His portraits hover at the edge of recognition. Ted, Joni, Joe, Fritzl, Ozzy, a kid from Mysterious Skin, even a dispirited man in a hotdog suit, figures bound less by likeness than by the shared absurdity of being human.
The paintings are confrontations, not tributes. Aitken approaches each subject with equal parts irreverence and gravity: the “quiet confrontation” of Ted’s blackened face; Joe from You Were Never Really Here, hollowed by violence; Fritzl’s banal eyes, which would be merely eerie if not weighted by horror; Ozzy, theatrical and excessive, death always at his shoulder. Even the hotdog, dressed for performance yet wholly unimpressed, becomes a synthesis of the whole: ridiculous, evil, joyous, ambiguous, unbearable.
Aitken’s canvas is not just a stage for portraiture but for the performance of looking itself. Every image carries the echo of what came before. Screen roles, tabloid headlines, crimes, clichés, the theatre of celebrity and shame. The stillness of his works is deceptive; they are charged with the excess of cultural memory, shadows thick with the absurdities and offences of living.
What emerges is a strange human chorus, a tragicomedy in fragments. Aitken holds together the joy, the banality, the mystery, and the violence of being alive, only to suggest that none of it quite adds up. The human condition, dressed up and ridiculous, is no less unbearable.
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