Text by Phin Jennings
The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ
Kingly Street London W1B 5QN
6 - 28 June, 2025
Kingly Street London W1B 5QN
6 - 28 June, 2025
Joel Wycherley Receiver, 2025, Mixed materials, 210×267×40cm
Sonya Derviz Looking forward, looking back(III), 2025, Oil and charcoal on linen, 240×185cm
“What if laughter were really tears?” - Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or “Probably.”
“Most likely.” “Quite possibly.” “I would imagine.” When we mention post-truth, we’re normally thinking about lies. But we are equally scared of vagueness. We look for something precise and reliable, but elusion and evasion leave us with little to hang our hats on.
Some think of art as a sort of crystallisation: thousands of possibilities in the form of ideas and impressions, distilled into a single image or object. The artist, a sort of alchemist, turns all that might be into something that is. The artwork stands sentinel as a definite object, an answer to the many questions that haunted its creation. Finally, solid ground.
Not here. Neither Sonya Derviz nor Joel Wycherley deal in truths. They deal in the almost-true, probably-true, maybe-true and ostensibly-true. In their work, vagueness is understood not as a distorting force but as a necessary condition of our experience of the world.
In making ambiguity a central underpinning of their work, both artists reveal the possibility of solid ground to be spurious. We seek comfort in knowledge, in the feeling that we have a reliable lay of the land. Always, to a lesser or greater extent, this is illusory. Indeed, we are at our worst when acting on the feeling that we understand something that we really don’t. Derviz and Wycherley place us into the centre of a narrative that, paradoxically, speaks truth precisely because of its lack of a declaration.
Wycherley builds physical lenses through which we glimpse a mediated version of what might lie beyond them. Sometimes a carved wood eyeball, sometimes a ripe lemon, sometimes an emptiness in disguise. Portal-like in scale and covering two opposing walls, his heavy structures seem to become architectural features of the space. Displayed as such – as conditions of the environment itself rather than discrete objects – they quietly animate the room, making it hum with the feeling that what we’re looking at might not be what it seems.
Between these pane-structures is Derviz’s painting. It contains a composite figure inspired by a number of found images but ultimately unanswerable to any of them. Her characters are constructed in the process of painting them, and therefore don’t exist outside of the paintings. This is a figment whose world extends no further than the edges of the canvas, where she hovers in a suspended state. Derviz’s intentional openness reframes ambiguity as defiant and bold; a mode of figuration that finds a truth beyond traditional ideas of representation.
The artists share an understanding of their subjects as essentially unknowable. Something is here, but exactly what is, by design, unclear. We circle it, we glimpse it occasionally, but never in a full and comprehensive form – because it doesn’t have one. Nothing is crystalised, nothing is clearly stated or conveyed; what looks like one thing could easily be its opposite. Laughter might really be tears.
Relaying little about their subjects, both artists tell us much about perception and experience itself. Each in their own way, they reflect the way that we see and understand the world back to us. When we look, it’s always through a lens of some kind, even if only the heavy gauze of our own physical hardware. When we dream or remember, we see faces that are amalgamations of those that we encounter in waking life.
These three works constitute an environment, a condition. The room that contains them is heavy with the sense that something meaningful is happening here, but not in plain sight. It’s somewhere, just around the corner, perhaps, just behind the glass, flickering in someone’s eye. It won’t present itself to us readily – but what real thing would?
-Phin Jennings
Sonya Derviz (b. 1994, Moscow, RU) lives and works in London, UK, since 2006. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. Solo exhibitions include: Closer, Sherbet Green, London (2023); and Pas de Corps, V .O Curations, London (2018). Group exhibitions include: Soft Focus, Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal (2024); Bury a Friend, Roman Road, London (2023); Into My Arms, Sherbet Green, London (2023); First Light, curated by Hector Campbell, Collective Ending, London (2022); Inside Out, The Artist Room, London (2022); It Seems So Long Ago, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); Minimal | Maximal, LVH Art, London (2019); Parfum d’épines, Phillips x V .O Curations, Paris (2019); and Paintings by, Alex Vardoxoglou, London (2019).
Joel Wycherley (UK) lives and works in London. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art in 2015 and is currently studying at the Royal Academy Schools (2024–2027). Selected exhibitions include: Locusts of the Sickly Sun, GLOAM, Sheffield (27th July – 18th August 2024); Patella, Studio EW.F1, Sheffield (7th October – 5th November 2023); Crumble Town, SET, London (5th – 7th October 2017); and Two Glass Eyes Are Better Than One, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London (9th September – 1st October 2017). Group exhibitions include: Dik Piks, Lady Beck, Leeds (21st July – 26th July 2017); Night, The Horse Hospital, London (29th April 2017); Fat Relic 2, Fat Relic, London (2015); Fat Relic, Fat Relic, London (2013); and WBDBM, Colour Elefante, Valencia (2011).