The Hole is pleased to present “against the day after before”, a solo exhibition by Ivan Seal. Seal paints ensembles of objects that don’t quite parse logically: the flowers are thick and meaty, the vases look like hornet’s nests, his chaotic assemblages might be cat scratching posts. Painted from intuition, free association and altered memories, the works evoke instability and a twisted reality from another dimension. Echoing this feeling in the back gallery of small figure paintings is a sound installation by The Caretaker, a frequent collaborator with the artist.

Across all Seal’s paintings, a void-like liminal space defines the background: ambient, timeless and uncanny. Created from dots and stabs of color, Seal blushes the gradients like makeup. The smoothness of the background contrasts with the gorgeous texture of the objects:

“If you place something in front of somebody, whatever you do in the background creates context. From the very start of painting (when I returned to painting after a period of purely sound art) I just wanted the background to be paint, to be a non-space, a space that you can’t place at all. It was really important to me that the location was ‘painting’.”

Constructed abstractions are camouflaged as depicted realities. Despite the Ikebana perfection of the bouquets and compositions, Seal does not work from life or photographs; he instead represents something semi-recognizable, something dancing with nearness. There is a clear language of images, playing with the structure of image making and how viewers have been trained to identify paintings of things. Yet instead of trying to be something, they hover near somethingness. Maybe they fail, but ultimately the paintings become themselves.

Echoing his associative approach to painting and sound art, Seal’s works take their titles from computer-generated words that appear scientific but are actually nonsense. Seal lets the painting take the lead, following them on their goose chase: the painting is only done when it stops staring at him—perhaps mid-sentence—like the lower-case title of the works and the show. There are dates on the paintings that go back five years, with lots of the work a sort of vandalism of works in the studio, returning to earlier works finally ready for conclusion or works that have left the studio coming back and resurfacing in another form, resulting in a body of work that feels confident and conclusive.

Ivan Seal (b. 1973 Stockport, United Kingdom) lives and works in Berlin. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Beijing, Milan, Zürich, London, and New York. Recent solo shows include Three Rooms at Carl Freedman Gallery and Generationgame at James Fuentes along with two museum group shows in the last year at The Hive Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China and PODO Museum, Seogwipo, Korea. Seal is also well-known for creating the album artwork for fellow Berlin musician and longtime collaborator, The Caretaker, with whom he has also exhibited and performed visuals internationally, from the Barbican in London to the Lincoln Center in New York.