More Than The Ear Can Hold

More than the ear can hold presents new and recent paintings by London-based artists Ella Belenky and Daniel Pettitt, in dialogue with one another for the first time. The exhibition’s title references a minor poem by American writer, poet and art critic Frank O’Hara on his love for radio, music and painting in which he seeks ‘little reminders of immortal energy’ after a fatiguing week at work. Embracing the role of impulse and intuition in the search for inspiration, the idea of switching between radio stations influences the curatorial approach, as if each painting represents a song on an eclectic and invigorating weekend playlist.

The pairing of Belenky and Pettitt highlights a shared commitment to experimentation beyond categorisation, with both artists forsaking a signature mode or method of painting. While approaches vary across works, there is an underlying tension between revealing and obscuring, communication and illegibility. Disparate elements coalesce into elusive and enigmatic compositions: abstract passages of gestural mark making, hints at figuration, fragments of found imagery or textual and graphic impositions – all blend into what Pettitt describes as ‘provisional fields and partial images’. Taken together, the paintings produce a symphony of vocabularies, techniques, palettes and motifs, more than the ear can hold. Curated by Andrew Price. 

Frank O’Hara, Radio

Why do you play such dreary music

on Saturday afternoon, when tired

mortally tired I long for a little

reminder of immortal energy?

All week long while I trudge fatiguingly

from desk to desk in the museum

you spill your miracles of Grieg

and Honegger on shut-ins.

Am I not shut in too, and after a week

of work don’t I deserve Prokofieff?

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning

to aspire to. I think it has an orange

bed in it, more than the ear can hold.
 

 
Daniel Pettitt (b. 1986, UK) studied painting at The Royal College of Art. He lives and works in London. Pettitt’s paintings operate within a register of allusive and speculative abstraction. Ingesting an eclectic mix of visual and cultural materials – such as theatrical signage, modernist poetry, and post-conceptual art – these works track fluctuations of index, fragment, metaphor, memory, semblance and mood as they congeal and dissolve into provisional fields and partial images. Some marks are indexical rather than allusive – traces of the passage of brush over canvas – while others might approximate known entities such as text or biomorphic forms. In this way elements of the painting mutually support, while also threatening to eradicate one another. As such, every gesture is as if met with its counter. Subsequent marks pile up, atop and alongside one another, making surfaces into a patchwork of different zones, legible as laid out across an expanse, not unlike a map. Such an array of marks is neither painstakingly determined beforehand, nor mindlessly executed in a passion of making. They are part of a carefully orchestrated oscillation, played out on the canvas, between intuitive gestures and a deep-seated scepticism about what such signals might promise.

Ella Belenky (b. 1991, USA) is a visual artist based in London, UK. Belenky completed her undergraduate BA in Studio Arts at Bard College in Annandale, New York (2013) and her MA in Print at The Royal College of Art in London, UK (2019). Belenky’s work is driven by a synergy of humor and tragedy, inside and outside, sense and nonsense. Collage is at the root of these contrasts, and helps serve as both subject and method, shaping a language that celebrates chance encounters and unexpected connections. The work functions within the expanded study of print — the painterly gesture in conversation with a regurgitated image; re-formed, printed and displaced. These layered forms through which we communicate instill questions surrounding the vibrancy of matter and the way we learn about the world and each other through it.

Andrew Price (b. 1993, UK) lives and works in London. He is an independent curator and artist liaison with experience working on exhibitions, publications, commissions and live programming for arts organisations including Lisson Gallery, Museo Helga de Alvear, Unit1 Gallery & Workshop, Goldsmiths CCA, Barbican Art Gallery, Tate Modern, Chisenhale Art Place and artists’ studios. He completed an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths University in 2019 and a BA in Culture, Criticism, and Curation from Central Saint Martins in 2014.

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