Models of Elsewhere

Left: Augustus Veinoglou, detail from the Spaceship series, Green One, 65 × 31 × 22 cm, ceramic, paper pulp and paint. Right: Chris Hawtin, from the Epoche series, Celeste, 120 × 90 cm, oil on canvas.

            

Chris Hawtin & Augustus Veinoglou

Date: Opening 18th September 19:30 

Duration: Until the 4th October 

Opening times: Every Thursday and Friday 16:00 - 20:00

Saturday 11:00 - 18:00, Sunday 12:00 - 16:00

Venue: Snehta Residency. I.Drosopoulou 47, Kypseli

Snehta is pleased to present a new exhibition bringing together Chris Hawtin and Augustus Veinoglou, two artists whose practices explore the unstable boundaries between the familiar and the unknown.

Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, both artists engage in idiosyncratic forms of world-building. Rather than constructing complete fictional universes, they work through fragments: landscapes, characters, geological formations, architecture, machines, organisms and artefacts, that appear to belong to larger systems whose full dimensions remain inaccessible.

Their works operate as partial evidence. A figure might suggest an unseen mythology; a rock formation might acquire the qualities of a machine; a landscape might resemble an organism; an architectural fragment might appear simultaneously excavated and constructed. Through processes of exaggeration, displacement, hybridisation and recombination, recognisable forms begin to behave differently.

There is something of the model, the map and the specimen in both practices. Worlds are reduced to fragments that can be isolated, examined and manipulated, made temporarily graspable. This approach recalls the intimate logic of model-making, collecting, cartography and concept design, where a larger environment is inferred through a limited number of objects, characters, terrains or structures. Yet these models never fully explain the worlds to which they seem to belong. Instead, they operate as clues: ambiguously uncanny versions of the real world that gradually assume the autonomy of sub-created worlds in their own right.

Both artists also draw upon the visual and conceptual language of the archive. Objects, drawings and fragments are presented with a degree of distance, classification and apparent objectivity, as though they were specimens or evidence drawn from a larger field of research. This mediated mode of display lends their fictional and speculative narratives a pseudo-epistemological precision: invented histories, environments and mythologies are treated with the seriousness of documented knowledge.

Chris Hawtin’s work explores the intersection of painting, sculpture and digital technology. Drawing on art history, mythology, science fiction and popular culture, his practice combines traditional techniques with digital modelling, AI-assisted image generation and 3D processes to create hybrid paintings and objects that appear simultaneously traditional and eerily contemporary.

A central thread in Hawtin’s work is the mythology of the Metics, a group of recurring characters who function as an anti-pantheon for the contemporary world. Appearing across painting, sculpture, writing and music, they embody forces and conditions shaping modern experience, including culture, movement, alienation, technology, history, power and destruction. Their appearance remains deliberately ambiguous: the figures depicted may be the Metics themselves, or individuals adopting their identities through costume, performance or ritual.

This exhibition expands this mythology with the introduction of four new characters, known collectively as The Epoches. Their arrival adds another layer to the world of the Metics, extending its cast of figures and opening new relationships and narratives within it.

Rather than illustrating a single story, Hawtin’s works present fragments of a larger and incomplete universe. Paintings and sculptures operate as portraits, artefacts and possible records of its inhabitants, leaving their histories and relationships open to interpretation. The work in this exhibition develops a mythology in which identity can be inherited, performed or assumed, and where the boundary between the figure and those who might follow it remains uncertain.

Augustus Veinoglou’s practice develops through an idiosyncratic form of world-building based on the extraction and transformation of existing forms. He begins with encountered material such as landscapes, geological formations, architectures, industrial remnants, maps, memories and locations altered through dreaming, isolating and studying these elements before hybridising and recontextualising them through drawing, modelling and sculpture. The resulting works retain traces of their origins while beginning to operate as components of another speculative reality.

Several works in the exhibition originate in the landscapes of Pelion. Drawings made in response to landslides and exposed torrent beds following Storm Daniel isolate geological and vegetal formations from their surroundings, turning them into autonomous micro-landscapes. In the series Spaceships, rock formations undergo a further transformation, becoming ambiguous machinic entities that seem part geological fragment, part industrial object, vehicle or architecture. The title introduces a science-fiction register that destabilises their scale, function and origin.

This movement between observation and speculation continues in Veinoglou’s sculptural cartographies of Lavreotiki and Sounion. Drawing on mappings, three-dimensional scans, memory and dream, actual sites are displaced and recombined. Industrial structures, military remnants and altered landscapes coexist within synthetic doppelgänger territories that remain recognisable while no longer corresponding entirely to geographical reality.

Across these works, Veinoglou approaches landscape as a system that can only be apprehended through its fragments. Changes of scale move between terrain, architecture, geological formation and machine-like object, while cartography becomes less a means of accurately describing territory than a method for constructing and navigating an unstable version of it.

It is here that the two practices meet most closely.

If Hawtin’s world is gradually disclosed through something resembling a pantheon, Veinoglou’s emerges through something closer to a cartography. One accumulates characters, entities and mythological fragments; the other accumulates terrains, sites, structures and material traces. In both cases, the larger world remains incomplete, inferred through what has been made available.

Both artists also work through traces, although the status of those traces differs. Veinoglou frequently begins with traces of places, materials and histories that already exist, subjecting them to processes of extraction and transformation. Hawtin’s objects and figures can appear instead as traces of histories, cultures or mythologies that have not yet fully occurred.

The exhibition therefore occupies a peculiar territory between archaeology and speculation. Objects can seem simultaneously discovered and invented. Painting can behave like a window into a larger physical environment; sculpture can resemble a model, fossil or fragment of an image; architecture can appear both constructed and excavated. Categories become unstable: natural and artificial, organism and machine, body and architecture, landscape and object, ruin and construction, past and future.

Both practices augment what they encounter. They exaggerate, hybridise and reconfigure elements drawn from the natural world, material culture and familiar mythologies, producing forms that appear to belong to narrative threads that have diverged from our own reality. These are not fully autonomous fantasy worlds, but subcreated worlds assembled from things that already surround us.

The exhibition also adopts aspects of an archival mode of display. Drawings, objects and sculptural fragments are presented as if they were evidence drawn from larger systems, lending the works a provisional sense of classification and documentation. This apparent objectivity creates a tension with their speculative character, allowing fictional, transformed and imagined worlds to acquire the temporary authority of recorded knowledge.

The exhibition does not attempt to reconcile the differences between the two artists, nor do the works illustrate one another. Instead, each practice alters the conditions through which the other can be understood. Hawtin’s mythological fragments make Veinoglou’s landscapes appear more like remnants of an unknown culture, while Veinoglou’s cartographic and geological structures allow Hawtin’s characters and objects to be encountered as inhabitants or artefacts of a possible terrain.

What emerges is less an escape from the existing world than a means of returning to it through estrangement.

Both artists construct elsewhere from what is already here. In doing so, our own world becomes temporarily unfamiliar.