Charles Avery: New Drawings of Onomatopoeia

From 2004 Charles Avery (Oban 1973) has devoted himself to describe an imaginary world, characterized by its own geography and inhabited by a specific population, flora and fauna, elements that testify Avery’s sharp-witted visionary and metaphysical rationality.

The artist presents this place (The Isaldenders) as an archipelago, surrounded by a black ocean and with an Island as its central nucleus. Onomatopoeia is the only town in the Island and epitomizes the main idea of

Charles Avery’s project and the metaphorical meanings connected with his work and thoughts.

The narrator (the artist himself) presents, through a story divided in chapters (various exhibitions), a general reflection on the cosmology and geography of these territories that he sketches out while simultaneously imagining them.

Key character of this Universe is The Hunter, through his “adventures” Avery reveals to the audience places, inhabitants and the strange figures that populate his drawings. Through the wanderings of the Hunter Charles Avery unravels his imaginary world: “he wanders and hunts …. Its ambition is to discover, bit by bit, an unknow territory while inventing it.

Like a network that connects points, his work consist of a process of disidentification. The story is told like a long book in which he tells us about strange figures: Alephs, Mr. Impossible, Stone-mice, the Noumeons, the Ghosts, the twins Theodora e Dorothea…

Opposite to our technological age, characterized by satellites and GPS, where everything can be reached and chronologically found, Charles Avery creates an epic dimension: the temporal connotation exists here only as myths, legends and tales textures, that are bizarre and endless. He totally reinvents the figure of the explorer but in the immobile world of human thought, while guiding the audience through the Island’s secrets passing on the laws that rule this imaginary land.

The ambiguous and complex world imagined by Avery is structured in a particular way so that the audience is at the same time captivated and alienated, this by virtue of heterotopia that spatialises time and arouses the eternal question between “duty” and “identity”. Each element that Avery represents – a snake, a pyramid, a triangle – is an archetype, a message that -although born from abstract truth- is originated only in the artist’s mind and therefore can be represented and always interpreted in a metaphorical and analytical key. After “The Islanders: An Introduction”, title of his first exhibition in which Avery presented his Universe (at Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London) with “Onomatopoeia: part 1”, at Plateau/Frac Ile-de-France, Kunstverein Hannover; and “Onomatopoeia part 2: The Port at EX3, Florence, Avery has continued on describing the developments concerning his Island and its inhabitants. In the exhibition at Galleria S.A.L.E.S., 10 new drawings and several new sculptures, will lead the audience to the discovery of previously unpublished episodes and peculiar characters that belong to the extravagant and imaginative world of The Islanders.