Sky Atlas: Gommaar Gilliams

Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Sky Atlas, an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Gommaar Gilliams, on view April 10 - June 27. In this body of work, Gilliams builds paintings the way archetypes are formed, through universal, inherited patterns of the human psyche that reside in the collective unconscious and are activated and shaped by personal and societal experience. His practice draws from systems of looking that long predate explanation: fables, myths, parables, allegories, poetry, and astrological diagrams, where meaning accumulates through return rather than resolution.

Stitching soaked in paint, combined with thick layers of fleshy pigment, corrections, and other tactile interventions, evokes the human condition embedded in the types of stories Gilliams references through both imagery and titles. Paint is laid down in layers that generate a palimpsests. Time remains visible, sedimented across the surface. Each work behaves like an object made to last, worked into the condition of something handled, repaired, and kept.

One of the leading motifs is the greyhound, a long-bodied hound suspended in deep blue, pale and alert, recalling medieval hunting imagery and its symbolic lineage. These elegant figures move through Gothic narrative cycles and courtly manuscripts, where the animal signifies loyalty, guardianship, and the discipline of desire. Elsewhere, avian forms cross pale grounds with the directness of early illustration, while a diver’s angled body enters the picture, echoing fresco traditions that contend with light and darkness. Gilliams selects figures with long memories—hound, bird, diver, swan, archer, moon, star, boat—and presses them through the painted surface, allowing them to interact with the full range of pictorial and material elements at play.

Throughout Sky Atlas, painting understands storytelling as a pre-linguistic act, closer to lullaby than plot. The sweetness and structural clarity associated with early Italian painting—particularly in the work of Piero della Francesca and Giotto—can be felt in the way certain forms settle into place, even as that order is persistently unsettled by abrasion, color, and revision. The works acknowledge that the desire for coherence—for Arcadia, or “a place of rest”—is inseparable from the awareness that such a place is always provisional, continually made, and already slipping away.