N.A.S.A.L. is pleased to present Heavy Weather by Charlie Godet-Thomas for its first solo-exhibition with the gallery.
The weather, usually used as a metaphor, has played a central role in the history of both poetry and painting, and this body of work might be seen as both a continuation of and a contribution to that history. What remains from that tradition in Thomas’ work is that the weather is both described directly and used metaphorically, but what is new is that it is made within the context of today’s super-charged environmental setting.
At the heart of Heavy Weather is an exploration of what it means to be held within a structure that protects us from the outside world. It is never made absolutely clear at what point the works refer to architectural structures such as houses or offices, or when they concern the organic structures of the bodies in which we reside. Free Circulation (2023), for instance, is a small sculpture of a house whose floors have collapsed due to some external force. On the back of the work are three words that swiftly connect the housing market to the settling of blood in the body after death; it reads: “Liquidity, Trickle-down, Lividity.” What is underlined in these works is a strong sense of pathos in the image of a failing structure, whether architectural or bodily, perhaps due to the metaphorical power of the former as a means of communicating the failure of the latter.