Communication Breakdown

Soup presents the gallery’s twenty-first exhibition, Kyvèli Zoi's solo exhibition, 'Communication Breakdown', curated by Megan Macnaughton. Kyvèli (b.1993, Athens) is a Greek painter living and working between Athens and Paris. She completed her BFA at New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2016, having undertaken an exchange at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2014. Alongside her painting practice, Kyvèli is the founder of KYAN, an artist residency programme in Athens. Macnaughton (b. 1995) is an art professional and independent curator based in Paris. For the past five years she has worked at Mennour gallery, accompanying leading voices of the contemporary art scene and coordinating the Emergence program dedicated to supporting recent graduates. Kyvèli’s paintings merge the domestic with the dramatic, highlighting the quiet theatricality of everyday life to explore wider concerns surrounding human connection, memory and our relationship to the natural and spiritual world. Carefully composed environments feel at once familiar and somewhat unsettled, with the intimate interiors serving as stage sets on which her cast of characters, objects and animals - imagined or otherwise - interact. Demonstrating a cinematic sensibility, closely cropped gestures, sentimental still-lives and charged, emotive exchanges suggest the existence of an ongoing narrative that extends beyond the confines of each canvas, and reflect the artist's own interest in cultural conversation and contemporary societal struggles. Kyvèli’s debut UK solo exhibition borrows its title from Led Zeppelin’s frantic, five- decade-old cry of romantic frustration and examines the distance that can develop between people, despite possessing all the technological tools designed to bring them closer. Produced in the aftermath of a long-term relationship, her latest suite of paintings casts communication difficulties as the emotional hinterland between intimacy and isolation, while navigating the unnerving experience of occupying once shared spaces alone. Kyvèli’s compositions appear to physically capture and contain such sensations, as faded figures float in oversized speech bubbles, television screens enclose distant crowds of indistinct faces, and framed paintings-within-paintings offer views into similarly vacant vignettes. Fishbowls recur throughout as an anthropomorphic analogy for such sudden estrangement, their occupant on display, separated and suspended within a self-contained simulation of its natural surroundings. Alongside, a ceramic reproduction of a vintage red telephone plays out the exhibition's hard rock eponym, its tinny timbre recalling the imperfect pitch of retro ringtones. Awaiting answering, a conversation discontinued for the exhibition’s duration.