Getting a Head

In 'Getting A Head', artist Jesse Rivers explores the head as a site of agitated movement. A student in the painting department at Slade 2021-2023, works made since graduating follow a concern with the line – mark-making that is dominant in Rivers’ visual language, sitting uneasily between painting and drawing. Rivers gives form to ambiguous flows in the mind that we know from cartoons, or MRIs (ideas, excitement, grief, cramping anxiety?). In 'Console', 2023, a silver noodle is held in tension; blurred lines burst outwards from '(A Head)', 2024; in 'Coins', 2024, they are contained as lead discs. The titles of Rivers’ works suggest a fluidity between physical matter, and the emotional or psychic experience of inhabiting a mind. In 'I am here and then I am there', 2024, two photographs depicting the rippling reflection of a grey London day in canal water, open a perspective outwards from the central nervous system, or ‘console’. The doubled reflection speaks to the gymnastics of seeing (the brain instantly flipping visual signals recorded ‘upside down’ by the eyes), troubling distinctions between matter and experience. Or perhaps this view, midway between the artist’s studio and Bow Tesco Superstore, is accumulating, leaking into the work. Is this the route ahead? (The artist is my lover. We share a first name, and a double bed so small that our Oxford pillow cases flop over its edges. Our heads rest against each other at night. He talks about his work often, but his concepts and processes — thoughts, feelings and intuitions — reveal themselves only partially.) Across the works presented, material experiments chase the ideas that preoccupy Rivers’ painting practice. The germ and germination of ideas remains an elusive subject matter taking him up, around, into and over the head. One more attempt: a 90° panoramic mirror, glued to the top corner of the gallery, looks onto crowns and ears. It is not easy to see inside.