Gabriel Orme
Oil on canvas
Oil on canvas
I make figurative paintings. I work from old photographs and archival imagery, building figures through loose tonal gestures in oil. The paint traces outlines without completing them, figures that feel familiar but unresolved, provoking the idea of a half-forgotten memory.
My degree show presents three large-scale paintings arranged as a triptych. They follow a gathering of figures through time, moving from energy and density to exhaustion and collapse. The paint shifts with them, becoming looser and more worn across the sequence.
This work draws on the ideas of writer and theorist Mark Fisher, who argued that contemporary culture has lost the ability to imagine a radically different and better future. He called this the ‘slow cancellation of the future’. I am interested in how that feeling lives in young people specifically, a pervasive sense that something is ending without anything new arriving to replace it.
Hauntology, the way the past haunts and stalls the present, runs through everything I make. I believe we are living in a moment where culture has become stuck in a loop, unable to move forward. My practice explores that feeling.
My degree show presents three large-scale paintings arranged as a triptych. They follow a gathering of figures through time, moving from energy and density to exhaustion and collapse. The paint shifts with them, becoming looser and more worn across the sequence.
This work draws on the ideas of writer and theorist Mark Fisher, who argued that contemporary culture has lost the ability to imagine a radically different and better future. He called this the ‘slow cancellation of the future’. I am interested in how that feeling lives in young people specifically, a pervasive sense that something is ending without anything new arriving to replace it.
Hauntology, the way the past haunts and stalls the present, runs through everything I make. I believe we are living in a moment where culture has become stuck in a loop, unable to move forward. My practice explores that feeling.