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I Feel Too Much, Real Emotion


Series of paintings and drawings created from 2014-2019. Works were exhibited at A-Dash, Athens Greece in 2019 with series of sculptures by artist Jacques Duboux. 

Text by Jaqcues Duboux and Rakel McMahon 


It is not uncommon, that the emotional has been dismissed by logic, set up as a dual where one excludes the other. This tendency to separate emotions from logic is overly simplified and limiting, where as in unity they are able to provide a more holistic perspective. This is exactly what the works of Swiss artist Jacques Duboux and Icelandic/Irish artist Rakel McMahon highlight when they are brought together in the exhibition Pushing the Feeling.

The exhibition is composed of two series: "I feel too much, real emotion", a series of colourful paintings by McMahon´s that address fluid, dreamlike, unstable and dynamic situations. And "Dynamies", a series of geometric, stable, mural steel sculptures by Jacques Duboux based on an inventory of primary gestures and a transcript of the artist’s physical proportions. Despite this obvious difference in their approach they are dealing with two sides of the same coin - human existence where the physical impacts the emotional, and vice versa.

A sampling of impressions is therefore celebrated here commonly. "I feel too much, real emotion" shows objects in different postures, under pressure, that refer to true sensation, but contained. Intense, but too cramped to move and manifest concretely. An "immotion". Then "Dynamies", although frozen by their sculptural status, function as a vector for expressing actions mentally, and in many ways according to the viewer. It ties in with its etymology, the Greek dynamis (δύναμις), which Plato related to the revealing property or quality of being.

These sculptures can as much be transposed in the context given by the paintings, that, conversely, the generosity of the paintings can virtually slide in the background of the sculptures to offer them an environment. As the concept of communicating vessels, the content of the two series seems static on the surface, but in fact, a random flow transfers from one to the other "receptacle", depending on the relationships that the viewer creates.