The Area Between. Adam Patrick Grant |

Did it matter then, she requested herself, strolling towards Bond Street, did it matter that she should inevitably stop utterly? All this should go on with out her; did she resent it; or did it not grow to be consoling to consider that dying ended completely? 

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)  

In Adam Patrick Grant’s studio in London, the air feels dense, virtually particulate. The house appears much less a room than an archive of gestures: an setting the place every thing, from a line drawn on a web page to a brushstroke left unfinished, holds the residue of a sustained act of trying. Along the partitions, completed and unfinished canvases; on the ground, sheets lined in research of the human physique drawn with a draftsmanship that’s each exact and tender. Grant strikes shortly, virtually restlessly, although the room, lifting a field from a nook and inserting it on the ground. From it, he pulls out a sequence of sketchbooks, every labeled and dated: Observational Drawing Book Nov–Jan 23. He locations them on the ground and tells me I’m free to look by means of them. I do — gladly, virtually greedily. 

I sit cross-legged on the moquette ground, the sketchbooks unfold round me like a personal constellation. Their pages are stuffed with fast drawings created from life — in cafés or pubs, on buses, at pals’ homes — interspersed with temporary notes and fragments all through. These drawings usually are not research for work in a literal sense, however a document of trying: a means of studying how one can see and how one can bear in mind. Spending time with them, I notice that Grant’s work doesn’t start with a picture a lot as with an angle: a particle of consideration. Over time, this accumulation of small, devotional acts of seeing turns into one thing bigger — a means of holding the world nonetheless, if just for a second. 

Grant has drawn commonly since childhood and labored throughout many mediums, however it’s although oil portray — a observe he has pursued persistently over the previous three years — that this attentiveness has discovered its most resonant kind.  

Before he started portray, Grant skilled in movie. He by no means pursued it formally, however the impulse to border and protect the fleeting was already current. When I ask him what sort of movies he made as a pupil, he laughs and says he can hardly recall — apart from one. It was a brief video, he tells me, exhibiting a mom and her youngster caught in a short second of tenderness. It’s not obscure why he remembers this particular movie. The intuition to find and linger inside a small, unspectacular second, to seek out intimacy inside the on a regular basis, was there from the start. Even earlier than he turned to color, Grant was trying to find that fragile level of contact between seeing and figuring out, between witness and recognition. 

Today, that impulse finds its kind in portray, although pictures stays its quiet basis. Grant produces and collects photographs: connections with household, pals, or passing encounters that act as fragments of life or a metropolis’s ongoing theater. From this huge private archive he selects particular person frames, moments that resist rationalization. These are the pictures that grow to be work. 

Walking, for Grant, isn’t merely a means of gathering materials however a mind-set — a rhythm by means of which reminiscence and notion align. He speaks of processing and coming to phrases with issues whereas observing his environment, how the setting can appear to reflect one’s personal way of thinking. This quiet dialogue between outer and interior worlds lies on the core of his observe.  

But the sources of this work lengthen far past his personal pictures. On the partitions and cabinets in his studio are stacks of previous prints and postcards: household photographs picked up in second-hand markets, nameless portraits, devotional photos, fragments of the visible detritus that circulates although town. He research this stuff as rigorously as he research his personal photographs, attentive to the best way sure faces or gestures appear to glow faintly with an interior residue of emotion. One specific picture, pinned to the wall, catches my consideration — a small, considerably awkward sacred image, its iconography unfamiliar. “I found it in Italy,” he tells me. “Something about it stayed with me.” The mixture of reverence and curiosity, of devotion and estrangement, feels fully attribute of his means of trying. For Grant, each picture — whether or not discovered, inherited, or self-made — carries the potential to open an area of relation, an opportunity to strategy one other individual, one other life.  

The scene in 13:47 10.02.23 (2025), for instance, appears, at first, abnormal: a person elegantly dressed, strolling towards us by means of a London road. His face carries a weary, virtually pained expression. In one hand he holds a bouquet of flowers; within the different, a crutch. Did he injure himself, or has he at all times carried that weight? Why so many flowers — a celebration, an apology, a farewell? Everything seems seen, and but nothing fairly reveals itself.  

Grant’s work possess this paradoxical readability. They start in documentation, within the visible language of pictures, but by means of paint they grow to be one thing spectral — tender, unsure, haunted by the second that has already handed. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida (1980), referred to as the {photograph}’s reality its that-has-been, a proof of what as soon as existed. His work undermine that certainty: the timestamp that tempts us with proof turns into, in his palms, a website of ambiguity. The factual turns into the enigmatic — the photographic punctum reimagined by means of paint.  

When I consider Grant’s figures, I consider Woolf’s London — these passing lives glimpsed from a distance, the wonder and melancholy of the abnormal. Like Woolf’s characters shifting by means of town, Grant’s topics appear suspended between the dwelling and the vanishing — the simultaneity of presence and disappearance that defines consciousness. Each of his work appears to carry each the dwelling and the vanishing without delay: a physique shifting towards us and away in the identical breath.  

There is an ethics of trying that runs by means of all of this. The individuals Grant paints are sometimes unaware of being seen. Yet this, too, mirrors the truth of city life. As Georg Simmel wrote, town teaches its inhabitants a sort of protecting indifference, a blasé floor that shields them from overstimulation.¹ Grant’s view, nevertheless, is much less about publicity than about recognition. He searches for these temporary instants when the façade falters — when somebody, nevertheless unknowingly, lets their guard slip, revealing a hint of emotion by means of a gesture, a look, the burden of a shoulder. “Reflecting on the moment through painting,” he says, “is a way of really getting to know someone. Someone you might otherwise never meet, or never know in that way.” 

“I’ve tried to use painting as a way of engaging with the emotion and humanity of observed moments without as much of the invasive indexicality of shared photography. That obviously can’t erase the complications of authorship that arise with observational representation though. I always want to root the pictures in empathy and a love of people but the nature of it can often feel intrusive. At the moment I’m trying to explore similar themes through more participatory kinds of portraiture while continuing to focus on truths found in passing moments.”  

13:47 10.02.23 was a part of Grant’s solo present “Mourning Dance” (2025) at 243Luz in Margate. The title itself looks like a paradox — two phrases from two totally different emotional registers held collectively. Mourning implies loss, an aftermath; dance counsel vitality, pleasure, movement. Together they kind a really fragile dialectic: a grief that strikes, motion that grieves.  

Grant explains that the phrase “Mourning Dance” was initially a private and quiet dedication to somebody who had been instrumental in his resolution to pursue portray. The phrases had been meant for them alone, however what drew him to the phrase was its pressure: a picture of conflicting feelings coexisting in fragile stability. It turned a touchstone for the exhibition, guiding each its imagery and its tone throughout a interval of non-public change.  

The works within the exhibition continued his exploration of temporality and tenderness, translating abnormal encounters into moments of vibrant suspension. In 18:00 12.08.23 (2025), two unidentified figures embracing on a bench, a car passing behind them. Is it a farewell? A reconciliation? Or merely a gesture of affection? The brushstrokes are fast but deliberate: every thing is seen and but not absolutely knowable. What unfolds earlier than our eyes is without delay clear and obscure, as a result of we don’t — can’t — know the story that led to this immediate. We can solely suppose. And the extra we glance, trying to find clues that may supply decision, the extra we come to know these figures not by means of narrative, however by means of proximity and the intimacy that grows from trying intently.  

The similar might be mentioned of 22:02 09-07-23 (2025). At first look, the scene may resemble a dance corridor or a social gathering, however on nearer inspection one begins to doubt: maybe — and it is very important maintain that maybe — the 2 figures within the foreground usually are not dancing in any respect. They could also be about to embrace; they could be in battle. The expression of the determine on the left, wearing purple, appears virtually tense. Are they arguing? It hardly issues. What issues is the act of questioning itself — the best way these uncertainties draw us deeper into the portray, till we discover ourselves suspended inside its personal ambiguity.  

Across the exhibitions, gestures return and shift: a flip of the pinnacle, a physique leaning ahead, a hand prolonged towards one other. Each one feels each acquainted and distant, as if time itself had been hesitating — pausing lengthy sufficient to be seen. 

Grant describes how, in revisiting recollections by means of drawing or portray, new truths typically emerge alongside the unique emotion. “Mourning Dance,” he notes, gathered works that shared these layered emotions, permitting them to a way that grief isn’t static however fluid, an vitality that circulates by means of something and every thing round you.  

The emotional vary of “Mourning Dance” echoed the duality of its title. There was a quietness to the work, but additionally a sort of inside motion — a way that grief, in Grant’s palms, isn’t static however fluid, an vitality that circulates by means of our bodies and areas. To mourn, right here, isn’t merely to recollect, however to maintain alive: to proceed to look, to maintain attending to the world. The present’s environment was neither somber nor consoling. Instead, it occupied that delicate in-between house the place sorrow shades into tenderness, and the act of seeing turns into an act of care.  

Back in his studio, surrounded by unfinished canvases and open notebooks, that sense of care is palpable. To paint, for Grant, is to stick with the picture — to carry it in pressure between truth and feeling, between what’s recorded and what’s remembered. It’s as if he waits for the paining to inform him when it’s completed, as if the picture itself should determine when it will possibly relaxation.  

This observe of consideration — without delay analytical and emotional — feels inseparable from the bigger ethic of his work. Grant’s archive isn’t certainly one of management however of care. He gathers photographs to not course of them however to accompany them, to be taught what they revel if given time and tenderness. The metropolis, in his work, turns into a website of silent encounter: an area the place the nameless and the intimate, the dwelling and the misplaced, coexist in perpetual flux.  

In this sense, his work share an affinity with Woolf’s phrases — their rhythm of notion, their openness to fleeting expertise. Both appear to acknowledge that appears are at all times provisional, that what’s most vivid hovers on the sting of disappearance. In Grant’s work, the abnormal turns into luminous exactly as a result of it’s transient.  

When I believe once more of the person in 13:47 10.02.23 (2025) — his flowers, his crutch, his unreadable expression — I notice that the portray doesn’t ask for interpretation. It asks for accompaniment, for the viewer’s willingness to remain within the uncertainty of the second. Everything is seen; nothing is fully recognized. Perhaps that’s the generosity of Grant’s particle: to remind us that focus itself is a type of empathy, that to look intently is to care.