Demon Sauce - Liam Mertens / Stephano Giordano

Wall based works by Stefano Giordano and Liam Mertens, incorporating layers of materiality and meaning at once humorous, dark and contemplative. About Daemon Sauce is an exhibition of works by Stefano Giordano and Liam Mertens. With ‘Sauce’ also being a homophone of ‘Source’ both Giordano and Mertens draw from disparate ‘Sources’ in a physical and metaphysical sense to create works that stretch the peripheries of what painting can be. Their intuitive studio practices are akin to divination and cooking. Creating objects, often closer to sculpture than image, maintaining a playful respect for the painting tradition, their practices find common ground in drawing from the darkness and absurdity of the everyday. Relying on feeling and intuition for the work to manifest, no ‘Source’ material is off limits. Their process results in wall based works with layers of materiality and meaning at once humorous, dark, contemplative, and both quiet and loud. Stefano Giordano The Untitled [▇▇▇] series adopts translucency as the main focus, drawing partly on Byung-Chul Han’s theory about veiling serving as a negative strategy for achieving Beauty. A curtain starts as a readymade which is then modified, worked on enough to acquire the quasi-persona quality of painting, but not overworked, as I try to avoid exploiting myself. Some curtains are stretched and left to hang at the bottom, creating a hybrid object, with the knot embodying both an act of violence and a gesture of care. I see the fabric as pixelated material, just like the found images that I screen-print on it. I consider these artworks paintings, even if the only painted part is the stretcher bars. For me it is very important to put them in the painting context; this enables me to have a starting point, as well as a push and play with the idea of what a painting can be. Stefano Giordano is an Italian artist living in London, UK. His paintings tend to blur the boundaries between painting and printing, and in some cases, sculpture. Built with systems, the works tend to be unfinished but resolved, anti-heroic and anti-macho. They seek to imitate life, not as images, but as objects presenting a painted surface. Through this approach, he questions how meaning is formed, interrupted, and reconfigured, producing works that sit between recognition and abstraction. He works through serial investigations and treats each body of work as a proposition rather than an endpoint. In his latest series, he screen-prints onto sheer fabrics, stretching and hanging surfaces to construct hybrid objects where image, surface, and support collapse into one another. These works produce surfaces that oscillate between legibility and opacity, and between presence and disappearance, exploring how meaning can be revealed and withheld through translucency and layering. He graduated from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2020. His work has been exhibited at Unit 1 Gallery, OXO Tower, and Lorfords Gallery, and he was longlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2023. Liam Mertens These hauntological assemblages draw from disparate sources to make humorous and at times profound statements on the absurdity of contemporary life. I use imagery from early renaissance through to late stage capitalism while referencing religious icons. These works emerge from an intuitive studio practice where they come together in an alchemical, creatively explosive process connecting to something bigger than myself while being the purest form of expression I have discovered. Originally from New Zealand, Mertens grew up in Auckland before completing a BA in Visual Arts at Auckland University of Technology after which he moved to London to pursue painting. He has exhibited in group and solo shows across the UK and Netherlands and completed an MA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Graduating in 2019 with a body of work defined by vivid tonal palettes which merged personal histories with New Zealand's art historical cannon. Having recently moved away from a solely painting practice, he has been finding joy and excitement in the studio creating assemblages which show a real curiosity of materiality and form. Since graduating, he has been involved in numerous group exhibitions and projects, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2020), Unit 1 Radical Residency VI , and the Jealous Prize (2019), and was a finalist for the Ingram Prize in 2021. “Socrates's daimon (the one who spoke first within him ) whispered to him: no. My daimon, on the contrary, is my stupidity: like the Nietzschean ass, I say yes to everything, in the field of my love.” - Roland Barthes Daemon -(in ancient Greek belief) a divinity or supernatural being of a nature between gods and humans Source - a generative force - a point of origin or procurement one that supplies information - a firsthand document or primary reference work Sauce - a liquid or semisolid food mixture used especially as a topping or ingredient for adding to or enhancing the flavor of a dish - something that adds zest, interest, or excitement Read more Toggle Painting Sculpture