Is There Yet Space For Light

Maria Appleton

Curated by Francisca Portugal

Press release (pdf)

Exhibition tour (link)

Time flies by here, with our fast-paced conception of living. We are in Paris, the city of lights. A metaphor for the epicenter of modernity, light is a synonym for avant-garde thinking. In this city, great minds have come together to reimagine the Western world. Maria wants to know, what about now? How many of these lights still brighten Paris in present times? Is There Yet Space For Light is an introspection on the absence of light in the world, shedding light on environments that corrupt our capacity to imagine and to perceive. It is indeed a rhetorical question, hence there is no question mark at the end. The digital world, over consumption, relentless construction, and all sorts of other deteriorating realities that occupy our space. Is There Yet Space For Light is as mental as it is incredibly physical exercise.

Colours and shapes and colours and shapes and more COLOURS AND SHAPES are Maria’s premises to transmute these thoughts into bodily sensations. A simple process of the mathematical formula called intuition: a sensibility of the artistic practice that produces its own instructions, visual orders and optical rules. The red is placed next to the yellow and these two colours merge perfectly into orange, as if they were the product of scientific phenomena. These works are the result of a time of reflection and observation, but mostly of chromatic experimentation. Colour only exists because of the presence of light, so, do you see these colours? Search for it! Look through its transparencies, do you see these colours? Boom, light! You are in the presence of light! Is There Yet Space For Light allows these ethereal elements to lead the way to a new renaissance of thinking through simple pockets of clarity.

Courtesy of Francisca Portugal

Maria Appleton (b. 1997, Portugal) is a textile artist based in Lisbon, Portugal.

Graduating from the Chelsea College of Arts in London in 2019, Appleton was since selected for various international residencies and has been invited to participate in several exhibitions across European galleries. She was selected in 2018 to the Kyoto Institute of Technology (2018, Kyoto, Japan) and the EMMA Institute where she developed Nicht eine Stadt, die war; stadt bad (2020, Pforzheim, Germany). In 2022, Appleton was invited by the French Institute to be a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts (2022 in Paris, France; residency funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation). Her two solo shows included: Gaze to see, Gauze to perceive at Galeria Foco (2021, Lisbon) and Is There Yet Space for Light with HATCH gallery (2022, Paris). In July 2023, Appleton presented her first-ever commissioned public artwork at the invitation of Daniel Vial, Jean-Christophe Claude and Laura Restelli Brizard for their forthcoming project, ‘L’Art c’est dans le vent’. The artist has inaugurated her first solo institutional presentation, curated by Filippa Oliveira, this year at Casa da Cerca in Lisbon.

Maria Appleton's practice finds its material form in an ongoing search for color and form, developed through multiple dyeing, weaving and printing techniques. Her pieces unfold as chromatic imprints on a juxtaposition of layers of cotton, silk and other industrial fabrics, defining a series of abstract and vibrant transparencies. Probing architectural conceptions of space, the artist challenges the experience of the eye through optical perspective games, while remaining very attentive to the movements of bodies.