Antechamber: Jamiu Agboke & Elli Antoniou
Forthcoming exhibition
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Opening Day Reception: 5 June, 12 - 7pm
Cob is pleased to present Antechamber, a duo exhibition bringing into dialogue new works by Elli Antoniou and Jamiu Agboke. Across painting, metallic drawing, and charcoal drawing, the exhibition unfolds as a constellation of atmospheres: intimate zones of perception shaped through light, material and spatial rhythm. Moving between the sacred and the secular, the works emerge like moments of private revelation - suspended scenes illuminated with near-devotional intensity, where matter becomes radiant and architecture itself begins to dissolve.
Rather than approaching landscape as image or site, both artists engage it as a shifting field of sensation and attentiveness: something encountered gradually through rhythm, memory, luminosity and material behaviour. Their works operate like fragments of a larger continuum, capturing fleeting states that hover between appearance and disappearance, recognition and obscurity. Horizons drift, forms remain provisional and compositions seem held within an ongoing process of becoming. Nothing settles entirely. Instead, viewers are drawn into spaces that feel simultaneously vast and intimate, where perception itself becomes unstable and heightened.
Central to both practices is an act of listening. Surfaces do not simply receive images but guide the rhythm of their own formation. Copper, aluminium, charcoal, wood veneer and reflective metallic planes each carry their own internal logic, resistance and velocity. Rather than imposing fixed structures onto these materials, Antoniou and Agboke work responsively, allowing atmospheres to emerge through repetition, submission and sustained attention. Meaning gathers slowly and relationally, as though the image is not constructed but revealed - something accessed intuitively before words, formulas or reason.
A spiritual undercurrent moves throughout the exhibition, though never through direct symbolism or narrative. Instead, the works approach perception itself as a devotional condition: embodied, instinctive and quietly transformative. Light functions almost sculpturally, isolating individual works like beacons or shrines within the gallery’s dimmed architecture. Encounters unfold through glimmers, reflections and partial illuminations that recall the heightened theatricality of Baroque sculpture or the concentrated beams of light found deep within caves and sacred sites. Time appears suspended within these environments. The ordinary physical coordinates of the gallery begin to dissolve, replaced by a sensation of weightlessness, equilibrium and subtle disorientation - as though viewers have entered a liminal state between atmospheres.
This spatial sensibility unfolds across two architecturally separated floors of the gallery. Rather than functioning as discrete sections, the spaces operate as two coexistent atmospheric states held in gravitational relation to one another. The upper floor, populated by Agboke’s works, explores energies that exist above the surface: luminosity, weather, tidal movement and the unstable conditions of orientation. Below, Antoniou’s works move beneath the membrane, tracing subterranean and bodily forces that permeate material space from within. Together, the two atmospheres exist in dynamic equilibrium, continuously affecting and recalibrating one another across the architecture of the exhibition.
For Antoniou, landscape exists as an ecosystem in perpetual metamorphosis, inseparable from bodily and cosmic experience. Metallic surfaces, charcoal fields and fragmented mountain forms become dispersed sensory events stretched across duration. Influenced by the fluid spatial sensibility of Shan Shui painting traditions, her recurring mountain motifs function less as destinations than as unstable temporal markers - distances that shift continuously between intimacy and enormity, memory and mirage. Vertical gestures recur throughout the works like translucent veils, simultaneously obscuring and revealing while invoking gravity as an invisible force shaping all experience.
Her continued exploration of the intercom works extend this language of thresholds further, transforming familiar architectural interfaces into speculative portals between realities. References to lifts, devotional shrines and Athenian apartment infrastructures collapse distinctions between transcendence and the everyday, dream states and material presence. Throughout her practice, metal is treated not as fixed industrial matter but as something capable of becoming immaterial - reflective surfaces dissolving solidity into atmosphere, light and perceptual flux.
Agboke similarly approaches painting as a process of attunement rather than depiction. Informed by Yoruba cosmological thought and the relational logic of Ifá divination, his works understand meaning as something that emerges gradually through alignment, repetition and embodied attention. In Bearing, the sea becomes less a subject than an atmospheric condition: a space of orientation, carrying, surrender and continual transformation. Horizons dissolve and reform while forms appear only momentarily before receding back into surface and light.
Informing Agboke’s paintings’ is a sensitivity to weather, shifting luminosity and tidal movement. Copper and aluminium surfaces respond differently to pressure and process, revealing themselves selectively and often withholding full visibility. Through this choreography of reflection and opacity, Agboke constructs environments that feel contemplative, cosmic and suspended outside ordinary time. His works remain in a continual state of emergence, occupying the threshold between material presence and disappearance.
Together, Antoniou and Agboke create an exhibition grounded in meditative attention to the fleeting and unstable nature of perception. The gallery itself becomes a mutable landscape activated by movement, shadow and changing intensity - a terrain navigated through gradients of brightness and obscurity. Each work functions as a threshold: a quiet gravitational pull drawing viewers into altered states of attentiveness and sensation. Even at their most composed, the works never feel static. Instead, they hold us within the suspended cusp between one state and another - between immersion and withdrawal, surface and depth, revelation and afterimage.
