prosper, despite a sense of crisis

In prosper, despite a sense of crisis, Ahren Warner presents a new body of work which ranges across multiple disciplines, including film, wall-based sculpture and painting. Collectively, the work converges to explore the conflict between the alluring ideal of self-optimisation and the lived reality of our flawed selves.

While language emerges as a key component of the exhibition – from the rhythmic narration that provides the backbone to Warner’s film you want to come, and to leave richer to the fragments of the artist’s own poems embedded in his paintings – it is evident that the work’s material qualities (whether colour, surface, cadence or line) offer up a mode of thinking beyond what is possible in words.

The five paintings occupying the gallery’s entrance appear at first as abstractions of light and colour, with repetitive, layered, and erased marks bringing to mind the weathered surfaces of abandoned buildings. Yet, the works do not occupy a purely abstract space, but instead originate in Warner’s drawings, made from a range of sources including stills from the artist’s own archive of film footage and historical artworks, such as a detail from Chaim Soutine’s Le Bœuf écorché (1925).

As the artist paints and re-paints these images, the material process of layering, glazing and sanding takes over. Each new layer of paint then responds to that which it obscures, the work becoming a trace of its own entropy. This process of creative destruction – of reworking the past, both personal and canonical, to produce a present that both depends on, and obliterates, its origins – is central to Warner’s exploration of how we experience the world around us, and our own selves within it.

The friction inherent in the idea of a mediated self is explored further by the works presented in the gallery’s main space. Here, a large-scale installation of film, paintings and wall sculpture takes the world of contemporary wellness, and the fantasy of an ‘optimal self’, as its subject matter.

In 2023, Warner spent two months filming in yoga retreats and wellness resorts on the Indonesian island of Bali. From the hours of footage the artist collected – filming everything from sunrise Bikram HIIT classes to Love and Kindness meditations – Warner has produced a film that explores the connections between the desire to optimise the self, the desire for others, and the wish to be desired. The highly-stylised colouration of this film, complete with the artificial halation of highlights invoking the film stocks of analogue cinema, is both seductive and garish, reiterating the complex of embodied and performative desire.

For Warner, each medium offers a specific means to explore his central questions. In addition to the dynamism and expansive language of his video work, and the stilled, fragmentary experience of the paintings that surround it, the found materials of his sculptural works come to exist as gauche forms of reliquary.

If the film work provides an exploration of the experience of mediating one’s own self-improvement via commercially designed fantasy, the paintings, which repurpose fragments of the artist’s writing, gesture towards the radical persistence of genuine emotion – feelings of sadness and desire – within such artificial constructions.

The same duality exists in Warner’s wall sculptures: repurposed yoga blocks painted in colours algorithmically sampled from paintings by Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, that serve as both shelves and as surfaces for writing.

Here, the selection and modification of objects associated with the modern wellness industry – from healing crystals to finger cymbals – is further mixed with irreverent art-historical jokes, such as the painting of lapis lazuli crystals (the source of the Renaissance’s most prized pigment) with garish neon spray paint. Embracing an ironic sculptural minimalism, these works feature a series of verbs (“prosper”, “engage”, “leverage”) that hover between instruction and aspiration, blurring the boundaries between agency, submission and fantasy via linguistic indeterminacy.

For all the conceptual intricacy of prosper, despite a sense of crisis – and despite what the artist once called the “party tricks of intellect” – there is a constant return within Warner’s work to the simple sincerity of a desiring, and dreaming, self. Through the works included here, Warner articulates a visceral preoccupation with how emotion both punctures, and is made possible by, the bodies, media and materials within which it is embedded.