Day Spectres & Invisible Interruptions

Curatorial Statement:
Sònia Lopez/TWS

An image rarely begins where we see it. Before it becomes paper, paint, pixels, canvas, or any other material form, it exists somewhere else, in the mind. We make connections constantly. A fragment of a photograph recalls a place we have never visited. A discarded object evokes a childhood memory. Two colours suggest a landscape. A logo carries the weight of an entire culture. A historical image collides with something contemporary. These connections may be fleeting, irrational, even contradictory, but they are part of how we make sense of the world.

Day Spectres & Invisible Interruptions, the second exhibition of The Weird Show Gallery, brings together artists who turn these mental connections into material images. Their practices differ radically in technique, background, and visual language, yet they share an interest in putting together things that don't necessarily belong together. Some work directly with collage; others arrive at collage through painting, digital composition, drawing, or processes that are harder to name. What connects them is a way of thinking, not a particular material.
The fragment, here, carries something with it: a memory, a reference, a texture, a cultural code, a trace of another image. Once placed alongside something else, its meaning shifts. The connection between elements may be carefully constructed or found by chance, but it always opens up a third space between them, something neither element could have produced alone.
Contrast is central to this process. Different scales, colours, histories, materials, and visual registers are brought into contact. Sometimes the result is playful or seductive. Sometimes it produces an unexpected friction. There is often something slightly unsettling in these images, precisely because the relationships they establish make sense without being entirely explainable. We recognise something, but can't quite place it. We understand the parts, not necessarily the whole.
That tension between familiarity and estrangement runs through the exhibition. A city becomes a memory, a painting turns into raw material, a discarded object takes on the weight of a symbol. The artists aren't just combining things; they're changing the conditions under which we see them. This is where collage starts working as a mental operation: a way of organising, disrupting, remembering, questioning, imagining. The material image is only the visible trace of something that started elsewhere.

Maybe that's where the spectres of the title come in. Not ghosts in any literal sense, but traces of things that stay active after changing form. The interruptions aren't necessarily visible either. They happen in the space between one thing and another, in the moment an image refuses to behave the way we expect. Day Spectres & Invisible Interruptions is interested in following what happens when images collide and strange territories emerge, not in defining where collage begins or ends.

Artwork John Whitlock

Artwork by Alvaro Naddeo

Artwork by Anthony White

Day Spectres? Invisible Interruptions?

Max Tuja/TWS

Sometimes names are a funny thing.
But most of the time they provide us with clues to understand things in a deeper way.

We named our first exhibition Phantom Tigers and Parallel Papers. Weird, right? This new one’s called Day Spectres and Invisible Interruptions. Weirder, if possible. What’s happening here? Are we obsessed with ghosts? Yes, at least I am, but that is not the ultimate reason why we chose these names.
What we’re doing somehow with these exhibitions is chasing intuitions, trying to see what’s there but it is not fully visible. We aim to find connections in elements that apparently are not obviously linked. These exhibitions are our way to talk about our obsessions. It’s about paying close attention to phenomena that might look seamless but when looking at the details there’s something else going on. With this deeper look we find ways of functioning that defy (at least some) definitions and let us think about new configurations and ways of ordering what we know, what we look at.
Collage and paint have been related in modern and contemporary art from the get go. Starting with Picasso and Braque, and continuing over the decades with names such as Rauschenberg, Motherwell, Polke or Tàpies among many others. We've been asking ourselves lately how that relationship keeps shifting. This show is our attempt to see how it plays out in the work of artists we love.
We met most of the artists featured on this show when interviewing them and we always love how, in their work, references and influences come from unexpected places and create a map where painting and collage always find ways to connect. Lola Dupre, who works with paper and scissors, cites Bruegel's Dulle Griet, pinned on her bathroom wall when she was a kid, as key to understanding her work. Alvaro Naddeo, who paints watercolor post-apocalyptic scenes, talks about how his work merges bits from the culture and landscapes of Brazil, Peru and the US where he has spent most of his life. John Whitlock found in paint a way to overcome many of the limits that he felt collage brought to his own practice. Anthony White's paintings build a bridge between the Dutch and Flemish masters and contemporary pop culture. And Nacho Martín Silva’s work rejects what appears evident and works from the disintegration of its elements. Collage and painting are in disguise, hiding in plain sight before the viewer’s eyes.

As with many other things we’ve been doing at The Weird Show, this exhibition is tackling one simple question: how is collage operating in contemporary art, and how is its definition permanently shifting?. And there are the ghosts. We intuit something and we chase it, but have more questions than answers, so we keep going.