Sulette van der Merwe | Threshold: 7 Piccadilly Arcade

Taking its title from the idea of the threshold as a point of transition: an architectural boundary between one space and another, but also a place of psychological and imaginative passage, Van der Merwe explores this condition of being between states, creating pictorial spaces in which the familiar gives way to the unexpected and apparently unrelated forms are permitted to coexist. The title carries a personal resonance too, reflecting the artist's own physical crossing from Cape Town to London for the exhibition. 

Central to van der Merwe's practice is Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, describing spaces that exist within or alongside everyday reality and in which different worlds, periods and systems of meaning can occupy the same space. Van der Merwe translates this idea into painting by bringing together figures, flowers, patterns, architectural elements and fragments of imagery that might otherwise have little obvious relationship to one another. Within the painting, however, these elements form a new visual environment, suspended somewhere between the recognisable and the imagined. 

The work is equally informed by the thinking of the German art historian Aby Warburg, whose approach to art history rejected the idea of a simple linear progression between periods. Warburg was fascinated by the way images, symbols and gestures migrate through time, disappearing and subsequently re-emerging in altered forms. Van der Merwe adopts a comparable approach, extracting fragments from art history and placing them within a contemporary visual language. Rather than recreating or quoting the past nostalgically, she is interested in the new meanings generated when historical imagery collides with the present. 

This process gives the paintings their distinctive collage-like character. Yet what initially appears to have been cut, layered and assembled is instead painstakingly painted. Different visual languages, histories and forms meet within a single surface, allowing the paintings themselves to become thresholds: spaces through which images can move between contexts, periods and meanings.